A M AG A Z I N E O F T H E S O U T H WINTER 2021

SOUTHERN MUSIC ISSUE VOL. 23

BUDDY GUY
* L I T T L E F E AT
* BIG FREEDIA
* MARY LOU WILLIAMS
* LEON BRIDGES
* DANIEL LANOIS
* JOI

UP
SOUTH
MAUREEN MAHON
ON THE LEGEND OF

TINA
TURNER
FREE CD INSIDE

ZANDRIA F. ROBINSON JASMINE SANDERS TERENCE BLANCHARD

ON THE AMAZING ON PHOTOGRAPHER ON PRODUCER

ARETHA KWAME QUINCY

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P U B L I S H E D I N PA R T N E R S H I P W I T H T H E U N I V E R S I T Y O F C E N T R A L A R K A N S A S
A M AG A Z I N E O F T H E S O U T H WINTER 2021

SOUTHERN MUSIC ISSUE VOL. 23

UP
MAUREEN
MAHON
ON

TINA
TURNER

SOUTH TERENCE
BL ANCHARD
ON

QUINCY
JONES
Z ANDRIA F. ROBINSON
ON THE AMAZING

ARETHA JASMINE
SANDERS

KWAME
ON

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PLUS!
L I T T L E F E AT
BIG FREEDIA
LEON BRIDGES
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JOI
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P U B L I S H E D I N PA R T N E R S H I P W I T H T H E U N I V E R S I T Y O F C E N T R A L A R K A N S A S
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 OXFORD AMERICAN * WINTER 2021

UP SOUTH SOUTHERN MUSIC ISSUE VOL. 23

12 Editor’s Letter: A Rhythm Nation F E AT U R E S
by Danielle A. Jackson
84
C A N ’ T Y O U S E E T H A T I ’ M L O N E LY ?
“Rescue Me,” on repeat
POINTS SOUTH by David Ramsey
14 I Love the Way it Sounds,
by Lynell George 92

18 In Search of Vigon, S L OW T I M E
by Miles Marshall Lewis Southern resonance in Daniel Lanois’s Sling Blade score
by Tim Greiving
24 Music from the Magic Box,
by Alice Randall 98

30 Our Us (Three Syllables), C O U N T RY B OY G O N E C I T Y

a story by Ed Pavlić A ballad of Johnny Bristol, Al Green, and Battle Creek’s Bloody Corner
by Rebecca Bengal
34 Alvin Ailey Finds His Voice,
by Mark Burford 108

38 I Am Bound for de Kingdom, T OWA R D T H E S U N

a poem by Marlanda Dekine Jazz and soul bloom Up South at midcentury
Photographs by Kwame Brathwaite
40 Lowell George in Eight and a Half Songs, Accompanying essay by Jasmine Sanders
by Elizabeth Nelson
42 Ode to Coca-Cola, Helium, Carbon, 120

a poem by Cal Freeman M A N H A T T A N I N E A S T S T. L O U I S

Ike & Tina Turner and the scene that formed their art
48 In Montana, by Maureen Mahon
by Jessica Lynne
54 Buddy Guy Walks into a Bar,
by Ben Greenman SONGBOOK
Notes on the sound of the South in the city
58 Where Is Jimmy Bishop?,
by Alex Lewis
140 Zandria F. Robinson on Aretha Franklin’s Amazing Grace
64 Overnight Scenario, 144 Jim Beaugez on Chicano Soul
by Karen Good Marable
145 Joi Gilliam on Turning Fifty
147 Dan Gentile on Jay-Z and UGK’s Big Collaboration
A r t by 148 Jay Jennings on Buddy Guy’s Checkerboard Lounge
Ethan D’Ercole, Malick Sidibé, Carla Jay Harris, Ida Kohlmeyer,
Lynell George, Derrick Adams, Zhou Yilun, Irwin Gooen, Jack Mitchell, 149 Big Freedia’s History of Bounce
Edgar Bryan, Jessica Lynne, Omar Velázquez, Gordon Parks, 150 Terence Blanchard on Quincy Jones
Angela Davis Johnson, Bryan Graf, Kwame Brathwaite, Jim O’Neal,
Carter/Reddy, Joi Gilliam, Daniel Hastings, Jonas Dovydenas, 151 Leon Bridges’s Spring Break Soundtrack
Brad Hebert, William P. Gottlieb 152 Harmony Holiday on Mary Lou Williams
158 Tarisai Ngangura on Carolyn Franklin
Cover 1: Tina Turner in concert at Madison Square Garden,
in New York City, 1969 © Walter Iooss Jr./Getty Images 162 Up South Music Credits
Cover 2: Aretha Franklin, c. 1967 © Induna Entec Media/Alamy
168 Simon Marotte’s Vocal Visionaries

6 WINTER 2021
Copyright © 2021 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
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A Hair Off the Top, 2014, silkscreen, by Ethan D’Ercole OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 7

CONTRIBUTORS
JIM BEAUGEZ is a music and fea-
tures writer published by Rolling
Stone, Smithsonian, Garden &
Gun, and others. He created the
docuseries My Life in Five Riffs
for Guitar Player and regularly
contributes to a variety of music
and audio publications.
REBECCA BENGAL is a writer of
fiction, essays, and reported non-
fiction whose stories appear in
numerous publications. She last
wrote for the Oxford American
about the Piedmont blues musi-
cian Etta Baker. Born and raised
in North Carolina, she currently
lives in Brooklyn.
Known as the larger-than-life
ambassador of New Orleans
Bounce music, BIG FREEDIA is a
nationally recognized hip-hop
artist, performer, and TV person-
ality. In addition to releasing her
own critically acclaimed EPs 3rd
Ward Bounce (2018) and Louder
(2020), Big Freedia has appeared
on several high-profile projects,
including her cover of “Judas”
on Lady Gaga’s Born This Way
The Tenth Anniversary album
(June 2021). She also appeared
on Beyoncé’s Grammy award–
winning “Formation” and on
Drake’s “Nice For What.” Known
by her fans as the “Queen Diva,”
Big Freedia is a loud and proud
advocate for racial and gender
equality and LGBTQ+ rights. Big
Freedia’s EP Big Diva Energy was
released in September 2021.
TERENCE BLANCHARD, a New Or-
leans native, is one of jazz’s most
esteemed trumpeters. Blanchard
began his career touring with
Lionel Hampton’s orchestra and
serving as musical director of
Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers.
A twice Oscar-nominated film
score writer/arranger (most re-
cently for his Spike Lee collabo-
8 WINTER 2021
ration on Da 5 Bloods), he is also
championed as a two-time opera
composer whose Fire Shut Up
in My Bones opens New York’s
Metropolitan Opera 2021-2022
season; this makes him the first
African American to have an op-
era at the Met. Blanchard is also
the Kenny Burrell Chair in Jazz
Studies at the UCLA Herb Alpert
School of Music. Blanchard’s lat-
est album, Absence, an homage
to saxophonist and composer
Wayne Shorter, was released in
August 2021.
KWAME BRATHWAITE, his older
brother, Elombe Brath, and the
African Jazz-Art Society and
Studios (AJASS) they created,
popularized the phrase “Black
Is Beautiful” in the late ’50s and
early ’60s inspired in part by the
writings of Marcus Garvey. By the
’70s, Brathwaite was one of the
country’s top concert photog-
raphers, shaping the images of
public figures such as Stevie Won-
der, Bob Marley, James Brown,
and Muhammad Ali. Brathwaite
is currently the subject of a ma-
jor touring exhibition, Black Is
Beautiful: The Photography of
Kwame Brathwaite. His work
“Nuit de Noël (Happy Club)” (“Christmas Eve, Happy Club”), 1963, a gelatin silver print by Malick Sidibé © The artist.
Courtesy Galerie MAGNIN-A, Paris. From African Artists: From 1882 to Now, published in November by Phaidon
has appeared in the New Yorker,
the New York Times, Vogue, the
Financial Times, New York
Magazine, Aperture, and more.
He lives and works in Manhattan.
LEON BRIDGES is an r&b artist
from Fort Worth, Texas, where he
currently resides. Following the
release of his Grammy-winning
sophomore album, Good Thing,
Bridges has issued a steady stream
of music including singles with
John Mayer, Kacey Musgraves,
Kiana Ledé, Lucky Daye, and
Noah Cyrus, as well as Texas Sun,
a collaboration project with the
trio Khruangbin, fellow Texans.
Bridges’s breakout track “River”
has been certified platinum. He
has performed at the Obama
White House, opened for Harry
Styles on an arena tour, portrayed
Gil Scott-Heron in Damien Cha-
zelle’s First Man, and sold out
the Hollywood Bowl and back-
to-back performances at Radio
City Music Hall. His latest and
third solo album, Gold-Diggers
Sound, was released in July 2021.
MARK BURFORD is R. P. Wollen-
berg Professor of Music at Reed
College in Portland, Oregon. His
scholarship, including an award-
winning article on Sam Cooke,
has appeared in numerous jour-
nals. He is the author of Mahalia
Jackson and the Black Gospel
Field, named the outstanding
book in the field of musicology in
2020, and editor of The Mahalia
Jackson Reader, an anthology of
writing on Jackson.
MARLANDA DEKINE ’s forthcoming
collection of poems, Thresh &
Hold (Hub City Press, 2022), won
the New Southern Voices Poetry
Prize. Their work leaves spells
and incantations for others to
follow for themselves.
CAL FREEMAN is the author of the
books Fight Songs and Poolside
at the Dearborn Inn. His writing
has appeared in journals includ-
ing River Styx, Southword, Pas-
sages North, Hippocampus, and
the Poetry Review. He currently
serves as writer-in-residence
with InsideOut Literary Arts
Detroit and teaches at Oakland
University.
DAN GENTILE is a journalist and DJ
based in San Francisco who cur-
rently serves as the culture editor
at SFGATE. Before joining SF-
GATE, he lived in Austin, Texas,
where he was the founding city
editor of Thrillist and freelanced
for publications including VICE,
Rolling Stone, Texas Monthly,
Roads & Kingdoms, and Ameri-
can Way. Follow him on Twitter
@Dannosphere and read more of
his work at dangentile.net.
LYNELL GEORGE is a Los Ange-
les–based journalist and essayist.
She is the author of three books
of nonfiction: No Crystal Stair:
African Americans in the City
of Angels (Verso), After/Image:
Los Angeles Outside the Frame
Learn more and visit NMAAM at blackmusicmuseum.com
(Angel City Press), and the
Hugo Award finalist A Handful
of Earth, A Handful of Sky: The
World of Octavia E. Butler (Angel
City Press). Her liner notes for
Otis Redding Live at the Whisky
A Go Go: The Complete Record-
ings won a 2017 Grammy.
Pioneering, progressive soul
funk innovator JOI GILLIAM is
a multidisciplinary artist from
Nashville, Tennessee, but is
professionally affiliated with
Atlanta, Georgia, where she
lived for twenty years becom-
ing a bricklayer, connector, and
creative leader of music, culture,
and fashion. Debuting with the
critically acclaimed, genre-de-
fying album The Pendulum Vibe
in 1994, Joi broke barriers and
shifted mindsets that furthered
the trajectory of freedom and
nonconformity in Black music
including unapologetic sexual
positivity. She currently resides
in Los Angeles and is a doting
mother of one daughter, Keyp-
siia Blue Daydreamer. Her full
discography and other works are
available at alljoieverything.com.
BEN GREENMAN is a former edi-
tor at the New Yorker and a New
York Times–bestselling author
who has published more than
twenty books of fiction and non-
fiction, including collaborations
with George Clinton, Brian Wil-
son, and Questlove. His most
recent book is Music Is History
(Abrams), a collaboration with
Questlove that looks at fifty years
of American history through the
prism of popular music.
TIM GREIVING is an arts journalist
in Los Angeles who specializes
in film music. He regularly con-
tributes to NPR, the Los Angeles
Times, and the Washington Post.
His work has been published in
the New York Times, Variety, The
Ringer, Los Angeles Magazine,
and Vulture. He has written pro-
gram notes for the Los Angeles
Philharmonic, the Royal Albert
10 WINTER 2021
Hall, and the Walt Disney Compa-
ny, and liner notes for more than
one hundred soundtrack albums
from Intrada, Varèse Sarabande,
and La-La Land Records. He
teaches film music history at the
University of Southern California.
HARMONY HOLIDAY is the author
of four volumes of poetry, most
recently Hollywood Forever and
A Jazz Funeral for Uncle Tom. A
collection of poems, Maafa, and
a collection of essays on repara-
tions and the body, Love Is War
for Miles, are forthcoming. In ad-
dition, she runs an archive of jazz
and diaspora poetics and is work-
ing on a biography of singer Ab-
bey Lincoln and a film on James
Baldwin. She last wrote for the
magazine about Florence Price.
JAY JENNINGS is editor-at-large
for the magazine.
ALEX LEWIS is an independent ra-
dio producer and musician based
in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
He’s produced award-winning
audio documentaries for NPR,
BBC Radio 4, and many other
radio stations and podcast com-
panies. He’s also the co-founder
of Rowhome Productions.
MILES MARSHALL LEWIS is the au-
thor of Promise That You Will
Sing About Me: The Power and
Poetry of Kendrick Lamar. He
lives in Harlem, where he is cur-
rently writing a cultural biogra-
phy of comedian Dave Chappelle.
JESSICA LYNNE is a writer, art
critic, and co-editor of the jour-
nal ARTS.BLACK. Her writing
has been featured in publications
such as Artforum, The Believer,
Frieze, and the Nation. Lynne is
the recipient of a 2020 Arts Writ-
ers Grant from the Andy Warhol
Foundation for the Visual Arts.
MAUREEN MAHON is an associate
professor in the Department of
Music at New York University. She
is the author of Black Diamond
Queens: African American Wom-
en and Rock and Roll and Right
to Rock: The Black Rock Coalition
and the Cultural Politics of Race.
KAREN GOOD MARABLE is a writer
raised in Prairie View, Texas. Her
essays, music journalism, and
stories have appeared in several
books and publications including
the New Yorker, Seventeen, and
Essence. After a lifetime of living
in Brooklyn, she and her family
now reside in Atlanta.
SIMON MAROTTE is a senior at
Conway High School in Arkansas,
where he is a member of the CHS
swim team. He recently published
his first crossword puzzle in the
New York Times, where he has
four more puzzles forthcoming.
He has also published in Universal
Crossword and will have a puzzle
coming soon in the Atlantic.
ELIZABETH NELSON is singer-
songwriter for the Washington,
D.C.-based garage-punk band the
Paranoid Style, a civil servant in
the field of education policy,
and a regular contributor to the
Ringer, the Oxford American, the
New York Times Magazine, and
Pitchfork, among others. In 2020
Spin magazine ranked the
Paranoid Style the twenty-
seventh best rock & roll band
currently working, thereby
adding twenty-six names to her
renowned Enemies List.
TARISAI NGANGURA is a Zimba-
bwean journalist and photogra-
pher whose work has appeared
in Vanity Fair, T Magazine, the
New York Times, Lapham's Quar-
terly, and Rolling Stone. She is
currently a senior content strate-
gist at the Atlantic and writes
music reviews at Pitchfork. Her
debut novel, The Ones We Loved,
is forthcoming from HarperCol-
lins Canada in 2023. You can find
her on Twitter @FungaiSJ.
ED PAVLIĆ is author of a dozen
books written across and be-
tween genres, the most recent
of which are Outward: Adrienne
Rich’s Expanding Solitudes
(2021), Let It Be Broke: Poems
(2020), and Another Kind of
Madness: A Novel (2019). He lives
in Athens, Georgia, where he is
Distinguished Research Profes-
sor of English, African American
Studies, and Creative Writing at
the University of Georgia.
ALICE RANDALL is the author of
Black Bottom Saints (Amistad),
now out in paperback. She is
a professor and writer-in-res-
idence at Vanderbilt Univer-
sity, where her courses include
Black Country, Country Lyric
in American Culture, and Black
Detroit. She hosts the Black Bot-
tom Saints podcast, which is a
weekly whirl of music, politics,
and cocktails, and helped curate
the Black Bottom Saints playlist
on Spotify. You can follow her
on Instagram @msalicerandall.
DAVID RAMSEY is a contributing
editor to the magazine. His work
has been anthologized in Da
Capo Best Music Writing, Best
Food Writing, Cornbread Na-
tion: The Best of Southern Food
Writing, and The Norton Field
Guide to Writing. He last wrote
for the magazine about Brother
Claude Ely.
ZANDRIA F. ROBINSON is a writer
and cultural critic from Mem-
phis. She is the author of This
Ain't Chicago: Race, Class,
and Regional Identity in the
Post-Soul South and co-author of
Chocolate Cities: The Black Map
of American Life. Her writing
has appeared in Rolling Stone,
The Believer, and New York
Times Magazine.
JASMINE SANDERS is a writer
and critic from the South Side
of Chicago. Her work has ap-
peared in the New York Times,
Artforum, Bookforum, and New
York Magazine. She currently
resides in Brooklyn.
Songwriters.
Screenwriters.
Journalists.
Publishers.
Directors.

STORYTELLERS
IN EVERY FIELD.
CELEBRATING 48 YEARS OF MUSIC BUSINESS
For more than 45 years, Mike Curb College of Entertainment and Music Business
graduates have been telling their own stories in the industry—and the students of
today continue the tradition.
Learn how you can tap into our rising talent at BELMONT.EDU/CURB.

A Rhythm Nation
B
y the time second grade arrived,
my portable pink boombox with
its manual tape deck and soft gray
radio station dials went with me
everywhere my mother would al-
low, including to bed. Mama bought issues
of Right On! and Black Beat when I pleaded
for them at the grocery store; Janet Jackson
on a cover in Rhythm Nation-black and steel
metal adornments feels especially vivid—I
ripped the image from the binding for a wall
in my room. At school, LaKeisha, Precious,
and I exchanged cassettes and memorized
lyrics together on the blacktop, reading them
aloud from liner notes, which is how I still
know every word of “Miss You Much,” and
why I’ll always associate the Isley Brothers
with Salt N’ Pepa and E.U.’s “Shake Your
Thang,” which sampled, interpolated, and
updated “It’s Your Thing” from 1969. Sam-
ples are history made audible, sonic lectures
we get to dance to, in holy communion with
every listener who lived before.
The most important band for us was New
Edition. Our fab five had released Heart
12 WINTER 2021
EDITOR'S LETTER
BY DANIELLE A. JACKSON
Break, their fifth studio album, not long be-
fore, and it reached the top five of the Hot
100 with five singles and five video releases,
most of which are now considered classics.
(This album also inspired the creation of Boyz
II Men, whose success, in turn, encouraged
labels to sign more boy bands like NSYNC,
Backstreet Boys, and 98 Degrees.) I’d been
too young to enjoy their earlier music, really,
including their first number-one hit, “Candy
Girl.” Even now, Ralph Tresvant’s lead vo-
cal, recorded when he was just fifteen, still
sounds fresh, jubilant, and frothy. The band
reminded many listeners of the Jackson 5.
Ronnie, Bobby, Ricky, Mike, and Ralph
were not yet tweens when New Edition
formed in South Boston’s Orchard Park hous-
ing projects. In his memoir Every Little Step,
Bobby Brown recalls a large, tight-knit fam-
ily and a neighborhood dotted with music
venues. When James Brown performed in
1972 at the Sugar Shack, where “all of the
top R&B acts in the 1960s and ’70s” went
when they came to Boston, Bobby was three
years old and joined the elder musician on
Of the Wind, photography, digital painting, and acrylic on paper, by Carla Jay Harris
stage to dance. The city of Boston had been a
relatively minor destination during the Great
Migration compared to Chicago, Detroit,
or New York. But between 1910 and 1950,
Boston’s African American community more
than tripled, with most émigrés settling in
the city’s southernmost areas. Like any mass
movement of people, “particular southern
counties became feeder lines to specific
destinations in the North, based on where
the earliest migrants went and established
themselves,” writes Isabel Wilkerson in The
Warmth of Other Suns. This is what con-
nects Norfolk, Virginia, and Roxbury—the
South Boston neighborhood where Malcolm
X moved to live with his older sister Ella
Little-Collins, who’d been born in Georgia.
Roxbury is, as well, the neighborhood where
Orchard Park once stood.
In a sense, a helix of time and sound
tethered our adoration for New Edition
to every fan who’d loved the Jackson 5, or
James Brown, or Frankie Lymon, or the Mills
Brothers. Of course, my conscious mind knew
nothing about this “changing same”; I only
© The artist. Courtesy Luis de Jesus Los Angeles
knew Ralph glided so sweet and smooth across the stuttering drums
on “If It Isn’t Love,” and his back and forth with Johnny on “Can You
Stand the Rain” felt like longing wrapped in sound, and connected the
uncertainty of new beginnings in love to that of new beginnings in life.
I f a meteorite lands and a thousand years pass before civilization builds
itself up again and looks back to understand what happened, I bet
my last name that the master recording of “Who’s Lovin’ You,” sung by
the Jackson 5, written by Smokey Robinson, Motown’s resident poet,
would help. Joseph Jackson was born in Ashley County, Arkansas, in
the late 1920s; the family’s matriarch Katherine was from southeastern
Alabama. They met after each of their parents moved to East Chicago,
Indiana, and when they married, the couple moved to Jackson Street
in Gary, just eight miles away. Maybe the post-meteorite artifact should
be the brothers’ 1968 audition tape for Motown, which lives in grainy
footage on YouTube. There is polish and confidence, both preternatu-
ral and haunting. Clips of Whitney Houston’s 1983 debut on The Merv
Griffin Show similarly reveal ambition, steeliness, a little bit of sorrow.
I imagine those feelings carried Cissy Houston’s parents from Early
County, Georgia to Newark. Did they remain with the Houstons and
the Warwicks on stages and recording booths, alchemizing into the art
that would soothe our ears and hearts?
This issue is dedicated to the impossible hope of movement. The Great
Migration, during which six million Southerners moved out of rural life
from about 1910 to the 1970s in search of “other suns,” rebuilding the
cities in which they landed. Sojourns from deeper South, like the Carib-
bean, including Puerto Rico, from which waves of people poured into U.S.
cities throughout the first half of the twentieth century (and after). The
centuries-long pas de deux between the people and cultures of Mexico and
Texas. The more than two million who fled the Great Plains during the ’30s
and created California. Our writers trace something deeply resonant in the
core of our most beloved music to this often-fraught search for refuge. In
“I Love the Way it Sounds,” Lynell George learns the music of Paul Gayten
and Papa Celestin from her mother, who’d moved to Los Angeles from
New Orleans, as “an homage to the past and gratitude for the ‘paradise’
they’d come all this way for.” Zandria F. Robinson wonders who all got
set free the nights Memphis-born, Detroit-raised Aretha Franklin sang
“Amazing Grace” in “The Watts Miracle.” In “Country Boy Gone City,”
Rebecca Bengal leads us to a “bloody corner” in Battle Creek, Michigan,
where she connects the thick sensuality of Motown’s most tender ballads
with the grit and loneliness of migration. Jessica Lynne finds an unlikely
ancestral home in Great Falls, Montana, reminding us that the search
for peace and open skies is not linear—in individual lives and through
the generations, we leave home to build anew and return, sometimes, to
do it all again. Tim Greiving uncovers how Acadian Louisiana’s sounds
found Daniel Lanois in Hamilton, Ontario. Maureen Mahon locates the
beginnings of west Tennessee-born Tina Turner, global superstar, in a
constellation of night clubs in East St. Louis, Illinois.
This issue also marks the return of our companion CD. Editors have
painstakingly curated a collection of songs—old and new—that rever-
berate with the pulse of hope in motion, including music by Mary Lou
Williams, Fleet Foxes, Duke Ellington, Particle Kid, and more.
Assembling this issue, we found restlessness, hope, and records of
impossible feats encoded in all that is infectious, indelible, aching,
and true in American music. In other words, as James Baldwin writes
in “Sonny’s Blues,” about the piano-playing jazzman of the story,
“Freedom lurked around us and I understood, at last, that he could
help us to be free if we would listen.”
DANIELLE A. JACKSON
Editor
Managing Editor HANNAH SAULTERS
Editor-at-Large JAY JENNINGS
Poetry Editor REBECCA GAYLE HOWELL
Production and Editorial Coordinator NOAH TAYLOR BRITTON
Art Directors CARTER/REDDY • www.CarterReddy.com
Art Researcher ALYSSA ORTEGA COPPELMAN
Copyeditor ALI WELKY
Editorial Interns
MORGAN ADAMS, SAVANNA BADER, PERRIN C. SMITH
Contributing Editors
LUCY ALIBAR, ROY BLOUNT JR., WENDY BRENNER, KEVIN BROCKMEIER,
BRONWEN DICKEY, LOLIS ERIC ELIE, BETH ANN FENNELLY,
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OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 13
 I Love the Way it Sounds
BY LYNELL GEORGE

S
ome children sail off to bedtime
dreams with “Once upon a time...,”
others by way of “In an ancient
land...” Each is an invitation, a story
spinner’s device to travel to some
exotic elsewhere—gentle lullabies in their
own right. Yet, as far back as I can remem-
ber, I knew no better incantation to invoke
an antique place as: “Let me go get down
that pot...”
Said “pot” was sunshine-yellow, enameled
cast iron, fitted with a heavy matching lid.
As well, said pot, more a deep skillet with
detachable wooden handle, was only used
twice a year to prepare specific centerpiece
meals. I knew it simply as “The Gumbo Pot.”
No family recipe exists on paper. Not a
one. Sometimes when I reveal this, I know
that people assume I’m being coy. But my
mother didn’t write them down. Neither did
her mother, my grandmother, nor did my
grandmother’s sister, my great-aunt, who
was a sorceress before the burners. I learned
as they had—by repetition. Trial and error.
“Guesstimates” and internal arithmetic. Sense
memory nudged you forward. These women
simply “got down that pot” in their respective
sunny Los Angeles kitchens and, after some
murmuring and some laughter—and the busy
rhythm of knives chopping onions, bell pep-

Synthesis BB, 1983, by Ida Kohlmeyer © The Estate of Ida Kohlmeyer.

14 WINTER 2021 Courtesy the New Orleans Museum of Art: Gift of Arthur Roger
per, and celery—someone, usually my mother,
began unspooling lyrics of faded, gauzy songs
sung in a language that was both familiar and
enticingly indecipherable.
Gardez, M’sieu Banjo, Misi Banjo
Comme il est bien, taillè
—Traditional
It all rose up; entwined: The scent of flour
and fat toasting into a roux; the sound of my
mother’s waltzing, rounded notes, drifting
in and out of Creole patois, that would only
a few times a year transport us elsewhere.
Someplace I hadn’t been, but I would come
to know, to love: New Orleans.
Years after my grandmother and great-
aunt had passed away, I realized that when
my mother cooked in this particular pot,
the walls and floor would disappear and
we were somewhere else, neither present
nor past, but together: In her humid New
Orleans bedroom with Lee Dorsey or Paul
Gayten and his band on the record player;
on the front porch in earshot of the front
room radio, listening to Dave Bartholomew
and Antoine “Fats” Domino charge through.
My mother’s voice would bounce with the up-
and-down propulsion of those tunes, some
of them stitched with lyrics that were, as
she explained, innuendo, but I heard as “in
your window.” I imagined the sly phrases and
glinting, syncopated notes floating through
the white eyelet curtains of their narrow
wood-frame house in the Seventh Ward. I
needed to absorb this. Be conversant.
Well lawdy, lawdy, lawdy Miss Clawdy
Girl you sure look good to me
Well please don’t excite me baby
I know it can’t be me
—Lloyd Price
In these rituals, my household wasn’t
unique. In time, I noted a theme, a puzzling
truism. Many of my elder relatives and their
friends—and friends of friends—had moved
heaven and earth to get here—to Los Ange-
les—yet spent so much time attempting to
replicate some sense of where they’d left.
The place they always referred to as Home,
even if they had lived in Southern California
for decades. Home resided in that middle-
distance stare. They carried their stories close
like a sweetheart’s picture in a locket. Many
of mother’s friends had uprooted themselves
from their own very specific Souths (rural,
city, deep)—locations that left signatures on
Listen to “Mother’s Roux,” an accompanying
playlist by Lynell George, while you read.
their spirit. I could hear their histories in the
cadences of their speech, the music of their
dialect and drawls; even in the varied way
they sucked their teeth or rolled their eyes.
Their Texases, Mississippis, Alabamas, and
Tennessees were on full display at backyard
or city park gatherings across the L.A. ba-
sin—the picnics and fish frys, cookouts and
barbecues where folks trotted out their birth-
home’s signature mains or sides, from deviled
eggs and monkey bread to Sock-it-To-Me
Cake and lavish stone fruit cobblers, studded
with aromatic peaches and apricots plucked
from backyard trees. All this: An homage to
the past and gratitude for the “paradise”
they’d come all this way for; the L.A. they’d
sunk their teeth into.
T hat snap of a floral-print tablecloth, shak-
en loose and then smoothed into place
on a picnic table, announced that the seri-
ous business of the day was to commence.
Women and men took their ritual places at
the smoker, or behind the well-worn oilcan
grill. The adults, moving with easy purpose,
juggled utensils and set up ancillary tables,
their strides broken only to bend to deliver
admonishments in blade-sharp, between-
teeth whispers to us restless children: Either
help or get up from under my feet! So help me!
Simmering in the backdrop, its own essential
presence: the portable, tube-amplified turn-
table. Stacked on its spindle was a smorgas-
bord of 45s alternating with LPs, all of which
were selected as carefully as the representative
side dishes. These records, brought by guests,
also claimed far-flung points of origin. The
South emerged vividly this way too: in this
group, Mississippi and Texas and Louisiana
most frequently. Within these exchanges of
sustenance, what became clear was that no
one was trying to push past the South; no one
had escaped it entirely. No one left everything
behind. Not really. Try as you may.
Maybe that story tailing you felt heavy
or sad or regrettably incomplete. Maybe
circumstances flipped the coin—“stay or
go”—for you. Or now, with the difficult choice
behind you, maybe you preferred instead to
remember only the kinfolk and kinship. Re-
convening with others who had made similar
journeys, with those who understood the
tough arithmetic of compromise, they found
this was where joy bloomed: in the ritual of
connecting and sharing the keepsakes of a
very particular Black American South that
had traveled so many miles in memories. It
was another way of saying grace.
Scan the code within the Spotify app or visit Oxford
American Magazine on Spotify to stream the playlist.
After a while, the music circling round
and round on the turntable cast its spell.
Sometimes voices quieted and that music
took center stage. The ballads and blues and
the joy spark of jump swing lifted the latch
to memories of old dance halls, high school
dances, porch parties, discreet after-hours
basement meetups. These tunes—across
genres, across generations—were layered,
sometimes complicated landscapes in and
of themselves.
But at these parties my mother’s music
wasn’t on the spindle. I should say, rather, my
mother’s Louisiana records were not. She did
have a collection of 45s and LPs she prided,
and it was wildly varied, alive with cha-chas
and merengues, bebop and West Coast jazz,
and threaded through with r&b. She espe-
cially gravitated toward vocalists—Sarah
Vaughan, Nina Simone, Carmen McRae—
women whose voices sounded like big-city
soigné, the women with drop-earrings-and-
evening-gown voices who embodied an urban
pulse that had entranced, and, ultimately,
beckoned her.
But those songs she gave life to in the
kitchen, that she’d learned from the radio
or the recordings that spun on the front-room
record player, had vanished: She’d lost her
small collection “to Betsy.” I’d later learn
that Betsy wasn’t a bully, let alone a person
at all, but a weather event. The 1965 hurri-
cane flooded out my grandfather’s shotgun
house. In haste, he took piles of what was
unsalvageable—records and clothes and
photographs and yearbooks—and trashed
them, then told her later. She’d left many
of her adolescent mementoes in that little
bedroom, a hide-away space that served also
as my grandmother and great-grandmother’s
sewing room. It was a big hurt that, even
though she didn’t say it out loud, she never
really got over. So while these Los Angeles
gatherings would celebrate the moment, the
vivid here and now, the turntable would turn
out Memphis and Gulfport, Beaumont and
someone else’s New Orleans. Later, the sky
would deepen to violet, and if my brother
and I were quiet enough, we could eavesdrop
on the conversations that filtered in over a
bump-and-grind or a grown-folks lament,
from a vanished region that was someone
else’s once upon a time.
What’s strange to me now as I revisit these
moments is that I don’t have a memory of
lacking anything, even without the pres-
ence of many physical records. There was
sheet music in the piano bench, there was the
OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 15

jazz station on Sundays that used to work in
New Orleans r&b tunes between the regular
rotation of Muddy Waters, Bobby “Blue”
Bland, and B. B. King. But it was mostly my
mother singing her own New Orleans “hit
parade”—Johnny Adams, Annie Laurie, Paul
Gayten, Archibald, and, of course, Fats—
broadcasting from her own frequency. This
too is how I first got to know New Orleans;
its geography; its rhythms; and its particular
shade of laments.
When my mother set off for Los Angeles
in the mid-1950s to begin college on a music
scholarship, she was, by chance, on the train
with one of her “hit parade” artists, Paul Gay-
ten, the bandleader. Freshly out of the splash
of the spotlight, he had just played a dance in
New Orleans my mother had attended. The
seating was less serendipity than mandated
circumstance. The two of them sat in facing
window seats on the Sunset Limited in the
segregated Jim Crow car, casting off one last
indignity: Gayten on his way to a West Coast
gig, my mother on her way to her first Los
Angeles address and all that awaited her—as
my relatives would say, “across L.A.’s pearly
gates.” I imagine the two of them in that
swaying car, moving across that invisible
yet ironclad Mason-Dixon Line, into their
boundless future selves.
I was born way down in Louisiana,
I love the way it sounds,
16 WINTER 2021
... I live way out in California,
the folks are very nice,
but they don’t know about Louisiana…
—Percy Mayfield
W ho we become is shaped both by what
we shed and what we keep. We memo-
rize the essentials that we cannot physi-
cally carry. This thread of thought wound
through me in my years-long process of
making my way through my mother’s be-
longings after she passed away in 2009.
Betsy may have “taken” some key keepsakes,
but I unearthed an unexpected memory
cache—some black-and-white snapshots,
her high school diploma, bolts of my grand-
mother’s old fabric. Something that puzzled
me, though, was a weather-safe storage bin
packed full of music—cassette tapes and
CDs—separate from her main collection
that always sat next to the living room’s
console stereo. I flipped through it with
anxious fingers—stacks of classical mu-
sic, jazz, contemporary r&b, and then a
stash of New Orleans music, some of it still
shrink-wrapped: Professor Longhair, Dave
Bartholomew, Dr. John, Allen Toussaint,
Louis Prima, Johnny Adams. Just looking
at the titles brought her into the room. I
heard the blues and “the blue” that made
me blush fresh.
At first, I was flummoxed. It was all sup-
posed to be gone, yes? But, looking closer at
the familiar record store stickers, the price
tags, I began to stitch together the how,
the when, and a sliver of the why. During
my adolescent years, when I was building
my own collection—the Stevie Wonder, the
Earth, Wind & Fire—she was just beginning
to rebuild hers. Something must have both
energized and delighted her to walk side
by side with me, bend time, and revisit the
person she had been at my age.
I had no idea how much she had worked to
shore up those holes, or how much it meant
for her to have the physical object, the docu-
ment. Was she more homesick than I thought?
Or, I think more likely, the act of collecting
had more to do with building something to
pass on. Maybe it was insurance, a promise
to the future that we, her children, wouldn’t
forget her South, but, even more, that we
would find our way back to it.
I turn to the right
You find a little bright light
That leads you to my blue heaven
You find a cozy place, fireplace
A cozy room
A little nest that’s nestled where the
roses bloom
—Fats Domino
W hen my mother boarded that westbound
train, dreaming a future, I know she
didn’t think she’d leave home for good. Con-
sequently New Orleans never felt past tense
inside her. Now, as an adult, when I wander
through her old New Orleans neighbor-
hoods as dusk descends, my ear trained to
music floating out of bedroom windows, or
find myself pulled in by the undertow of a
neighborhood second-line beat on a Sunday
afternoon, it’s as if I have never not been
here—in this ongoing moment.
To find this secret stash felt nothing
short of magic. I carried the prize—care-
fully strapped in like a passenger—across
town to my own sunny Los Angeles home,
where I now also keep watch on the yellow
pot. It’s all there waiting for me: when I am
ready for the floors and walls to fall away;
when I want to travel back to once upon a
time. I can be here and there, at once. Wist-
fulness, I’ve come to know, doesn’t go away.
It’s passed on, an inheritance like a cache of
records, like a recipe that you must commit
to memory, like a patois you grow into. You
can summon it, whenever you need it, from
the deep, the major and the minor, the bitter
and the sweet.
Music and memorabilia collected by the author's mother.
 In Search
of Vigon
BY MILES MARSHALL LEWIS

A
forest green sign hanging above
globally familiar golden arches an-
nounces OUVERT, on the first level
of an Haussmannian-style build-
ing in the ninth arrondissement
of Paris. Six weeks after the French capital
ended an eight-month-long COVID curfew,
cafés, coffee shops, and fast-fooderies still
pronounce to the public they’re open for
business. On the corner, an older woman
wearing a hijab sits outside underneath an
olive umbrella, feeding her child pomme
frites. Where Boulevard Montmartre meets
the rue Drouot, I finally notice the small
plaque I came searching for, marking this
McDonald’s as a former “temple du rock”
from 1955 to 1981: Le Golf Drouot nightclub.
Tracing Southern soul music’s international
migration led me to 2 rue Drouot in the Opéra
district. A quaint Korean bistro called Pause
Corée now occupies the address—once a hang-
out spot for David Bowie, the Who, and the
Moroccan soul man I’m specifically in search
of, Vigon. I arrange my camouflage cloth mask The horseshoe-shaped area currently oc- Presse thirteen years ago. As a teenager in
and walk into the restaurant, looking past cupied by kids unboxing Happy Meals once Morocco, he encountered the music that
colorful banners to the exposed brick walls housed an indoor mini golf course in the formed the foundation of rock & roll while
they hang from: the original walls of Golf ’50s (hence its name). Inspired by Whisky partying at U.S. military air bases in Sidi Sli-
Drouot. Climbing a forty-step staircase once à Gogo over in the sixth arrondissement, mane and Kenitra. “And there, they brought
led clubheads to an expanded space above a bartender floated the idea of attracting the records that came from America on the
the current-day McDonald’s (formerly Café a cool crowd with American rock & roll. week of their release. ‘Twist and Shout’ by
D’Angleterre) to a dance floor area with a small Installing a Seeburg jukebox full of seven- the Isley Brothers, it was sung in Morocco
stage. Picture the Paradise Garage mashed up inch vinyl records brought in by American before the Beatles covered it!”
with CBGB, and voilà. soldiers stationed in the city, Golf Drouot was Musically, the world of the mid-’60s takes
I cross the street and photograph Pause soon alive with the sounds of Sam Cooke, of bit of imagination to conjure. I am old
Corée alone, then with adjacent McDonald’s Ray Charles, Jackie Wilson, Fats Domino, enough to recall the days before stream-
in the frame, as Parisians zip by on rented and more. This went on for almost a decade ing services, broadband internet, digital file
electric bicycles or wander the sidewalk before an African greengrocer on vacation sharing, and international cable networks—
absorbed in their smartphones. Casting my named Abdelghafour Mouhsine made his all things that subsequent generations of
mind back to black-and-white pictures from way to the stage in November 1964, covering music lovers have long been used to. Practi-
the early ’60s that I googled the day before, I Little Richard songs like “Long Tall Sally” cally speaking, to be in France back then
imagine the corner of the block crowded with and fronting a local band called Les Lemons. meant that local radio mainly supported
young adults, all waiting in line underneath The lanky nineteen-year-old with the relaxed hits like “Les Mauvais Garçons” by Johnny
the red neon sign reading GOLF DROUOT. afro had rechristened himself Vigon. Hallyday and other homegrown singers like
Sunglasses and sport coats, mod cuts and “I was going to the grunts’ dances every him. Some (like Hallyday) imitated the rocka-
miniskirts. Saturday,” the singer told Agence France- billy style of rock & roll from the U.S. But

18 WINTER 2021 Vigon et les Lemons performing at Golf Drouot in Paris, 1964. © André Crudo/Photo12/Alamy

the soul music of black American labels like
Stax and Motown was still largely the stuff
of cult followings. Record companies’ global
distribution lacked the proper reach. French
partyers had a better chance of hearing Bo
Diddley at Golf Drouot from 45-rpm singles
brought into the country by Americans than
on the France Musique radio station.
And whereas Johnny Hallyday felt free to
mimic Elvis, where were the black French
who might’ve copied the Ike & Tina Turner
Revue? People like my wife’s family—origi-
nally from the French West Indies of Mar-
tinique—made up the population of black
France, along with Africans from French-
colonized countries like Senegal, Algeria,
and the Ivory Coast. But the period of the
’60s holds no record of black French singers
expressing themselves through the idiom of
soul music from the states, outside of occa-
sional cover versions. Les Surfs, a sextet from
Madagascar, scored on the French charts
with “Reviens Vite et Oublie,” aka
the Ronettes’ “Be My Baby,” and
“Shoop Shoop…Va L’Embrasser,”
a cover of Merry Clayton’s “The
Shoop Shoop Song (It’s in His Kiss).”
The white French rock & roll group
Les Chaussettes Noires adapted
Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode”
for their biggest hit, “Eddie Sois
Bon,” in 1961.
And then there’s Vigon, who
scored a deal with Atlantic Records
after his debut at Golf Drouot.
C rocodisc record store sits in
walking distance of the Sor-
bonne, on a street literally named
the rue des Écoles, or the “street
of schools.” I pass the university’s
stately chapel and amble down the
rue Champollion, known among
film buffs for its arthouse cinemas:
La Filmothèque, Reflet Médicis, Le
Champo. Taking note of Wong Kar-
wai’s In the Mood for Love and a
Jodie Foster retrospective, I stroll
the Latin Quarter a few blocks be-
fore noticing an ornate chain-link
gate signaling that Crocodisc is
closed for business.
NOUS SERONS EN VACANCES DU
25 JUILLET AU 15 AOÛT reads a
sign taped to the front door. Even
considering how hard Parisian
businesses have been hit since the
pandemic, plenty of French stores
continue to take their August vacations. I
had intended to initiate an old-fashioned
digging-in-the-crates search for some Vigon
vinyl, but so much for that. In France, the
so-called juilletistes holiday in July while
the aoûtiens take off for parts unknown in
the month of August. Unluckily for me, some
pretty devoted aoûtiens run Crocodisc.
Unable to flip through their labeled bins,
I peek behind the gate to see the music on
display, with an eye for black American mu-
sic. Of almost twenty-five albums presented
in the window, nearly half come from the
U.S. I spy jazz drummer Chico Hamilton’s
The Dealer; Sun Ra’s Blue Delight; Ramsey
Lewis’s Mother Nature’s Son; James Brown’s
rare disco album, Sex Machine Today; Jim-
my “Bo” Horne’s Dance Across the Floor;
Weather Report’s 8:30; Lonnie Liston Smith’s
Visions of a New World; the Main Ingredient’s
Euphrates River; the Blackbyrds’ City Life.
No Vigon, though I’m not surprised.
The Atlantic Records roster consisted of
soulful legends like Aretha Franklin and
Wilson Pickett by 1968 when they released
Vigon’s sole American single, “It’s All Over”
(with “The Spoiler” on the B-side). Sites like
Discogs sell the seven-inch online but comb-
ing through dusty vintage vinyl always feels
like more fun. Since rocking Golf Drouot,
he’d released his only French-language sin-
gle, “Un Petit Ange Noir” (a translation of the
Joe Tex ballad “Hold What You’ve Got”), in
1967. English, however, was a language Vigon
could only sing phonetically—he would never
learn to speak soul music’s native tongue,
or completely understand it. By ’68 he hit a
groove in his adopted city, opening for the
likes of Little Stevie Wonder, Otis Redding,
and Sam & Dave when they made their live
appearances at Olympia music hall.
Walking twenty minutes from Panthéon,
crossing the Seine to Les Halles by tourist-
filled footbridge, I arrive at the Monster
Melodies record shop. The owners must be
juilletistes because they’re open for busi-
ness. Vigon’s raspy, Gallic-targeted soul never
set the world on fire, including France. The
singles I hope to find include his covers of
r&b greats like Otis Redding (“Don’t Mess
with Cupid”), Big Mama Thornton (“Hound
Dog”), Larry Williams (“Dizzy Miss Lizzy”),
and Bob & Earl (“Harlem Shuffle”). But Vi-
gon’s versions never topped the charts, in
France or elsewhere.
Still, American soul music touched Paris
back when James Baldwin and Josephine
Baker walked the same cobblestone streets
laid out in front of this record store, way
before online interconnectivity made it easier
for cultures to bleed onto each other. Such
was the strength of the music. I go in search
of Vigon to prove that for a bright, shining
moment in the 1960s, he actually happened.
Monster Melodies greets me with Marvin
Gaye’s “Let’s Get It On” wafting through the
air, looking like some musicologist hoarder’s
nightmare (complete with a dusty disco mir-
ror ball hanging from above). Vinyl albums
even decorate the ceiling here, and the
proprietor has carved a barely navigable
path through cartons of music stacked high.
Like the window display at Crocodisc proved
earlier, classic black American music con-
tinues to be a commercial draw worldwide,
especially among obsessive vinyl collectors.
Decorating the area are platters that matter
by Al Green (I’m Still in Love with You), the
Crystals (He’s a Rebel), and Stevie Wonder
(Songs in the Key of Life), even platters that
OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 19
perhaps didn’t matter as much: Split Decision
Band by the group of the same name, and
Honey Cone’s Sweet Replies.
But no Vigon. In a remote corner I rifle
fruitlessly through the end of music’s al-
phabet, between the Undisputed Truth and
Barry White. I finally ask the owner, who
immediately responds in accented English;
he accesses his archives on a computer as
timeworn as our surroundings. He’s heard of
Vigon, at least. But no dice. He says Universal
Music France released a greatest hits album,
The End of Vigon, on compact disc in 2009.
Monster Melodies is all out of those. (The
title, I learn later, is named for Vigon’s cover
of “The End,” a 1958 hit ballad by Oklahoma-
born African American vocalist Earl Grant.)
The owner suggests Crocodisc.
S uddenly, I remember seeing Vigon before.
Sitting by a stone sculpture of a gi-
gantic head, near the five hundred-year-
old Gothic church of St. Eustache, it all
comes back to me. In the summer of 2019,
I’d visited an exhibition at the Musée de
l’Histoire de l’Immigration called Paris-
Londres, Music Migrations: 1962–1989. Cu-
rators showcased how waves of migrants
from the British West Indies influenced
London through musical, political, and so-
cial movements. They also touched on how
Africans from former French colonies did
the same here. The wide-spanning curation
included vintage editions of London Lite
and New Musical Express; Lee “Scratch”
Perry figurines; flashy fashion from Afro-
beat pioneer Fela Kuti; 1980s French hip-
hop radio emissions; and more.
All my photos from the exhibition lived
on in the cloud. With skateboarders gliding,
crashing, and falling behind me, I connected
to some weak public wifi to download my
shots. And there was Vigon. The museum
positioned four twelve-inch vinyl sleeves be-
hind a glass partition, albums by Bernadette
Grimm, Les Safari, Les Missiles, and Vigon.
His placement in the exhibition was never
crystal clear to me. Though, yes, he was a
north African singer recording in France, he
sang soul music. The American r&b covers
he chose never had a political bent like those
of Nina Simone or Curtis Mayfield.
“In Paris in the 1970s, African artists be-
came politicized with the extreme left in a
movement that made much use of music to
recount the stories of immigrant workers,”
curator Stéphane Malfettes told The Observer
newspaper at the time. “It was a movement of
20 WINTER 2021
struggle. Not all African music was political,
but it took on a political aspect. Even if it was
very trendy and popular, the lyrics were very
politically engaged.” Not Vigon’s, obviously.
I descended a nearby escalator and rode
the métro over to Montmartre, where my
wife’s cousin Vincent lives. We’d gone to the
Musée de l’Histoire de l’Immigration togeth-
er, and I recalled that he’d bought a catalog.
I expected maybe to find out more. But no.
Vigon merits his own page in the exhibition
catalog, but the information recounts things
I already know (though the curator did inter-
view him). Vincent reshelves his book, pours
glasses of a 2016 Bordeaux, and starts telling
me what he remembers about the first season
of the French version of The Voice.
At sixty-seven, Vigon resurfaced on chan-
nel TF1’s singing competition reality show,
The Voice: La Plus Belle Voix. (America’s The
I go in search of
Vigon to prove
that for a bright,
shining moment
in the 1960s, he
actually happened.
Voice isn’t the first iteration; the original
comes from Holland.) He performed clas-
sics like “Soul Man” and “I Got You (I Feel
Good)”; Vincent says that judges eliminated
him after a few weeks. France had largely for-
gotten him by 2012. If anything, he was more
semi-famous in the new millennium as the
father of Sofia Gon’s—a pop singer who re-
leased two albums (Comme Avant, Le Marché
des Insolites) before an untimely passing in
2011 from a heart attack at twenty-five. They
sang a duet on her debut album’s “Good
Times,” though it’s a mystery how close or
distant they were. But my cousin-in-law has
worked at Fnac department store since the
’90s and remembers shipments of Les Soul
Men CDs by Vigon Bamy Jay eight years ago:
the unique trio of Vigon, sixty-three-year-
old Johnny Hallyday backup vocalist Erick
Bamy, and Jay, the thirty-four-year-old for-
mer lead singer of the French r&b quartet
Poetic Lover.
Apparently Vigon’s loss on The Voice quick-
ly turned into a win. Pushing seventy, he
scored a gold record with the Vigon Bamy Jay
album Vincent tells me about. Les Soul Men
featured r&b standards like “(Sittin’ on) The
Dock of the Bay” and “Ain’t No Sunshine.”
The trio’s velvety voices found just the right
chemistry harmonizing over mainstream
urban radio grooves. Like an unspooling soap
opera story, the drama continues over some
YouTube clips and a second round of wine.
Vincent says that months before releasing
2015’s Love Me Tender, a Vigon Bamy Jay
sophomore album of Elvis covers, Erick Bamy
died of cancer. Since then, Vigon’s gone back
into seclusion.
“Now many soul men find their work re-
appearing on French, English and Japanese
labels,” music writer Gerri Hirshey wrote in
Nowhere to Run: The Story of Soul Music.
“Like so many tons of surplus wheat, after
its late-sixties bumper crop, soul became
most valuable as an export. Some black art-
ists, like Marvin Gaye, moved permanently
to Europe.…The soul circuit overseas is still
lively.” Hirshey wrote those words circa
1984. But I’d brought her love letter to soul
music’s origins with me on vacation, and
the passage resonated after seeking, find-
ing, and losing Vigon all over again in the
space of an overcast week in Paris.
I hoped to eventually speak with him,
about his role in the movement of Southern
black cultural expression in France by way
of Morocco; about France’s fetishization of
black culture, which started with jazz during
the first World War and continued in the ’60s
with the Southern soul aesthetic he clearly
loved so much; about the complexities of U.S.
military bases in the Arab Maghreb serving
as his gateway to black American expression.
Even before the overseas soul circuit Hirshey
mentions became lucrative in the 1970s, Eu-
rope made the occasional attempt at import-
ing Southern-based rhythm and blues. The
U.K. churned out the blue-eyed soul of Dusty
Springfield and Tom Jones. But France—with
its colorblind reputation on race—turned out
to be a proving ground for a skinny African
émigré to find stardom interpreting the black
American spirit, even sharing stages with
the likes of Otis Redding and Chuck Berry. I
wanted to ask what that was like.
Googling the last known publicist for Vi-
gon Bamy Jay, I requested an interview. No
one responded.
 A JOYFUL CELEBRATION OF BLACK CULTURE
THROUGH THE FOODS OF THE AFRICAN DIASPORA
Recipes, essays, poetry, artwork, and community from
more than 100 Black luminaries

“Mouthwatering, visually stunning, and intoxicating, Black Food tells a

global story of creativity, endurance, and imagination.”
—IMANI PERRY, professor of African American Studies, Princeton University

AVAILABLE WHEREVER BOOKS ARE SOLD

 IN MEMPHIS,
BEALE STREET,
PHILLIP VAN Z ANDT
Every Story Is A Song
Songs, stories, and places are interconnected – especially in Memphis, where almost
any location can conjure a musical lyric, legend, or new-generation artist.
We asked Memphis’ music community which songs these storied locations call to mind.
Use it like a playlist, an itinerary (or both) the next time you’re in town.

“ Your Love Is Too Late”
BY DON BRYANT: BEALE STREET
“This song takes me back to the early
1960s Beale Street scene: singing in Willie
Mitchell’s band, working in the clubs, writing
songs for The 5 Royales, Solomon Burke,
and Little Junior Parker – whose music you
still hear today on Beale,” Bryant says.
The street’s 20-plus live music venues are
book-ended by the Memphis Rock ‘n’ Soul
Museum and Memphis Music Hall of Fame.
DON BRYANT,
JAM IN THE VAN
“Respect Yourself” by The Staple Singers: “Everybody Knows (The River Song)”
National Civil Rights Museum by O.V. Wright: The Mississippi River
In the years following Dr. Martin Luther From “the minor stomp of the intro
King Jr.’s death, artists including The Staple to Wright’s soaring first lines and
Singers composed the soundtrack of the minor groove on the final word,” nothing
civil rights movement. Memphis’ historic captures the emotion of the Mississippi
Lorraine Motel is now the National Civil River like this song, says Alex Green of
Rights Museum. Reigning Sound.
“People Make the World Go Round” NATIONAL CIVIL RIGHTS MUSEUM,
DAV I D M E A N Y
by The Temprees: Soulsville &
Stax Museum of American Soul Music
An “amped-up guitar and string section”
make The Temprees’ version of this song
“grittier and funkier,” says Tonya Dyson,
Executive Director of Memphis Slim
Collaboratory, a space for sharing and
creating music in Soulsville, home to the
Stax Museum of American Soul Music and
Willie Mitchell’s Royal Studios.

THE BLUES FOUNDATION'S SOUTHERN AVENUE,

BLUES HALL OF FAME, S E A N DAV I S
RAPHAEL TENSCHERT

SPECIAL PROMOTIONAL SECTION

 GRACELAND MANSION,
SEAN FISHER
“Can’t Help
Falling in Love”
BY ELVIS PRESLEY:
GRACELAND
When Elvis was asked what
he missed most about
Memphis while he was
away in the Army, he
answered, “Everything.”
Pay tribute to The King at
his home, Graceland.
“She’s a Mover” by Big Star:
Overton Square Entertainment District
“This was part of a late-night session at
Ardent. Within a stone’s throw of Overton
Square, Ardent Studios was the heart of
Midtown nightlife,” says Big Star drummer
Jody Stephens, who serves as Studio
Manager at Ardent today, still down the
street from the vibrant Overton Square
Entertainment District.
“We Need Love” by Donald O’Connor:
Crosstown Concourse
“This song embodies the fortitude of
creators in Crosstown Concourse and the
surrounding neighborhood with its driving
disco beat,” says Jared Boyd, program
manager for community radio station WYXR
91.7FM, which broadcasts from Crosstown
Concourse alongside a listening lab, live
music venues, art galleries, and more.
SUN STUDIO,
ALEX SHANSKY
MEMPHIS MUSIC
HALL OF FAME,
DAV I D M E A N Y
MISSISSIPPI RIVER,
LOGAN YOUNG
“Hot Cheetos” by MonoNeon:
South Main Historic Arts District
In this song recorded in a home
studio off Main Street, MonoNeon
“demonstrates the funk, jazz, gospel, and
soul of Memphis over hip-hop drums,”
says producer IMAKEMADBEATS.
Also in the neighborhood: The Blues
Foundation’s Blues Hall of Fame,
DittyTV, and Central Station, a boutique
hotel in a century-old train station that’s
still in use today.
“Love You Nice and Slow”
by Southern Avenue: Overton Park
“This song is inviting and familiar with
tons of character, much like my favorite
park, where mornings and evenings
bring about peek-a-boo sunrises
and sunsets,” says Tikyra Jackson of
Southern Avenue.
STAX MUSEUM OF
“All I AMERICAN SOUL MUSIC,
MARISSA STRANG
Need
Is You”
BY BLACK CREAM:
SUN STUDIO
“Four musicians grooving
together and nothing else:
Just like the simplicity of Sun
Studio’s legendary sound,
this song is just about
capturing the moment,” says
neo-soul artist Nick Black. WWW.MEMPHISTRAVEL.COM/MUSIC
SPECIAL PROMOTIONAL SECTION
 Music from the Magic Box
M
otown Saturday nights in the
mid-Sixties my grandmother, a
Black woman born near Marion
Junction, Alabama, would often
put on a party dress to “watch
Lawrence Welk and babysit Bootsie.” I,
Bootsie, wore footie pajamas as we peered
at and listened to an orchestra play what its
bandleader called “champagne music.”
I hated watching Lawrence Welk almost as
much as I loved my grandmother.
To my Black Detroit kindergarten ears and
eyes everything about The Lawrence Welk
Show seemed slow and boring—except the
bubbles that opened the black-and-white
episodes and sometimes floated through the
air during a dance number.
24 WINTER 2021
BY ALICE RANDALL
My grandmother’s reaction to the show
fascinated. Dear would smell a different kind
of sweet on Lawrence Welk nights. Not her
everyday baby powder sweet, not the loud
flowery perfume she wore to church, but a
quieter Saturday-night-watching-Lawrence-
Welk sweet and peppery.
You had to get up close to catch a whiff of
her Saturday night perfume. I would jump
in her arms and put my nose in her neck as
soon as she walked through the front door
of my parents’ home. After receiving the first
of my many hugs of the evening, my father’s
mother would stride straight to the ornate
television console and cut on ABC.
The Lawrence Welk Show debuted on na-
tional television in 1955, and new episodes
Dance Off, 2015, a mixed-media collage by Derrick Adams © The artist.
anchored Saturday night on ABC until 1971.
Lately, I’ve been trying to tease out why a show
starring an orchestra leader born in North
Dakota in 1903 meant so much to my grand-
mother who was born in Alabama in 1898.
Pondering Dear’s perspective, I’ve come to
love “Larry” and his thick German–accented
“wunnerful, wunnerful.”
Georgia Minnie Litsey Randall was born
in a place, Dallas County, Alabama, and at a
time, the late nineteenth century, where the
expectation was Black people were servants
and white people were served; where the
norm was Black people entertained and white
people were entertained; and where it was
widely understood by the powers that ran
Alabama out of the state capitol in Montgom-
Courtesy the artist and Salon 94, New York City
ery that all white performance was better
than any Black performance.
Watching Lawrence Welk, we, Dear and
Bootsie, disrupted all of that. A white man
and his orchestra were playing “champagne
music,” tranquilizing tunes that aspired to
be peppy, for us. They were serving us. And
she was enjoying it.
Only a person who had acquired a de-
gree of safety, a degree of ease, a degree of
“wunnerful, wunnerful”—something no-
body Black in Alabama had ever achieved in
the state at the time my grandmother lived
there—could enjoy Welk’s music. Sitting in a
spacious and chic Black Detroit home owned
by one of her children, taking care of a Black
granddaughter whom she believed was every
kind of safe, Dear was one such woman.
Sometimes she would bring me a bottle of
bubbles and I would blow bubbles through-
out the broadcast. Often we would drink Ver-
nors ginger ale out of champagne glasses
and nibble on peanuts as we listened and
watched.
Ease was one part of the pleasure and
disruption; a sense of pride in Black artistry
was another.
Even as a five-year-old girl I knew I saw
better dancing at my dancing school on a
Saturday morning than I saw any Saturday
night on Lawrence Welk. And every time
the orchestra played, even when I was blow-
ing bubbles, Dear talked about how much
she liked Welk’s orchestra and about the
better orchestras she loved: Count Basie’s,
Duke Ellington’s, and the Mills Brothers.
My grandmother passed her profound
appreciation for the Mills Brothers down
to me. I devote a chapter of Black Bottom
Saints to Skipper Mills, founder and father
of the quartet. They were not an orchestra
in the usual sense of the word, but starting
in about 1928, they established their early
reputation with a gimmick: they could imi-
tate “a whole orchestra” using only their
voices and a single guitar.
The Mills Brothers’ aesthetic, as I have
come to understand from my grandmother’s
appreciation, was a stealthy country club
cool that evaded much musical redlining.
They evaded being confined to live per-
formance. They evaded being confined to
raw and rural sounds. They evaded being
confined to work and prison rhythms. They
evaded intensity. With sound, they claimed
a radical Black right to leisure, to calm, to
gentle and pretty moments that gave voice to
Black dignity, Black pride, and Black genius.
Singing disciplined and complex four-part-
brother-harmonies, they performed their
individual and collective humanity with re-
finement and nuance.
“We are each different and we are for each
other” was the political message my grand-
mother conveyed to me that she understood
to be embedded in their performances. She
taught that same lesson in her home. Diverse
but unified is what I was coached to hear
in every bar of the Mills Brothers’ whole
orchestra.
O n February 22, 1964, the Mills Brothers
were on The Lawrence Welk Show. They
sang their just released single, “It Hurts Me
More than It Hurts You,” and then they deliv-
ered their biggest hit, “Paper Doll.” You can
watch the performance on YouTube.
Welk pays the group great deference. He
introduces them as “special guests” who
Ease was one part
of the pleasure
and disruption;
a sense of pride
in Black artistry
was another.
“have entertained the nation, and for that
matter the world, for many, many years.”
He refers to the group as the “very famous”
Mills Brothers and invites his audience not
to listen to them, but to meet them.
Dear, who had Black and white relatives
(legitimate and illegitimate kin, all acknowl-
edged) living in Selma, understood from
personal experience that this episode of Law-
rence Welk’s show would rattle and enrage
much of white Selma and gratify Black Selma.
And the Mills Brothers, who often stated,
“Jim Crow is the fifth Mills Brother; he trav-
els with us everywhere we go,” would have
been able to list hundreds of communities
that would hear the explosion contained in
their genial performance of accepting Welk’s
deference while loudly and proudly calling
the bandleader by his first name.
For many Southerners, this performance
of public respect for a Black family by a white
man was a first-time occurrence inside their
homes. In Black homes Welk’s performance of
respect for the Mills Brothers was a promise
of better days to come; in white homes it was
proof that the world as they knew it was end-
ing. Both sides were reading the Welk show
right. The Voting Rights Act of 1964 would
pass July 2, 1964. The Mills Brothers’ dulcet
performance was a reckoning bell.
After the brothers complete their first
number, Welk returns to the stage, declaring,
“Aren’t they great?” He positions himself as
an old fan and frames the performance the
viewers have just seen as something Welk has
desired and worked toward for three years.
Then he turns the stage over to Harry Mills.
The Mills Brothers are not deferential to
Welk. They don’t compliment him. They
barely thank him. They don’t promote the
single or mention their record label.
They take the time between the songs to
tell their own story. In fifty seconds, Harry
Mills paints a word portrait of a family of
Black working artists, landing most vividly
on the death of their eldest brother in 1936;
their father joining the group to replace
his dead son; and the father’s leaving the
group in 1955 to move into a retirement of
hunting and fishing. Harry takes obvious
pleasure in announcing his father’s leisure,
his well-earned rest after a lifetime of work.
Then the brothers launch into “Paper
Doll.” No song better exemplified Skipper
Mills’s labor. The single—with Skipper Mills
singing bass, playing guitar, and doing
much of the managing of the group—first
entered the Billboard charts for a single
week in 1942, appearing solely on a South-
ern Region chart. In May 1943, it made the
national Billboard chart. In early November
1943, “Paper Doll” landed at number one
on the national Billboard charts and stayed
at number one until late January 1944. The
song would spend a total of twelve weeks at
number one on the national Billboard chart.
On Billboard’s “Harlem Hit Parade,” it would
rise to number two for the year. Only fifty
singles in the twentieth century sold over ten
million copies. “Paper Doll” was one of them.
When the Mills Brothers finish perform-
ing “Paper Doll,” Welk shakes hands with
each of them, makes a few remarks, then
pronounces, “Thank you, Gentlemen.”
For Dear, that was a performance wor-
thy of perfume. And bubbles. The Lady well
understood both the power of a transgres-
sive performance and the power of being a
OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 25
transgressive audience. She introduced me
to that power with perfume, bubbles, and
music from the magic box.
I n the twenty-first century, a new magic box,
a laptop armed with a YouTube subscrip-
tion, allows me to travel back to see and hear
again the sights and sounds that made me. I
have a favorite trip.
Between June 7, 1969, and March 31, 1971,
fifty-eight episodes of The Johnny Cash Show
were presented on Saturday nights on ABC.
This coincided exactly with a period in early
middle school when I spent many weekends in
a strange little hamlet on the Chesapeake Bay
called Fishing Creek as the guest of an eleven-
year-old spitfire who ran around with me in
a gang of six girls—two Black, four white—at
Georgetown Day School in Washington, D.C.
My friend looked something almost exactly
like an eleven-year-old version of Liza Min-
nelli circa 1969 in The Sterile Cuckoo, which
means she had pale skin and a spiky, dark
Beatles haircut. Her bedroom in the Fishing
26 WINTER 2021
Creek farmhouse was in an unfinished attic
up a rickety stair. She had relations who
lived next door full time on the island, a
young husband and wife. The husband was
an oysterman.
We adored the oysterman because he
would loan two eleven-year-old girls a small
boat we could use to explore the bay and
nearby sandbars and islands alone. And
he was willing on occasion to zip us out to
the barren islands and leave us for hours to
play in the sand between the giant bleached
white driftwood sculptures and would reli-
ably come to pick us back up.
The oysterman adored Johnny Cash. As I
remember Saturday nights on Fishing Creek,
he drank beer, we drank Coke, and Johnny
and his guests sang. The Johnny Cash Show
was not just the blackest thing on Fishing
Creek Island, it was the blackest art thing
in my whole Washington world.
Gathering around the television to watch
and critique music was very much a black
thing in the Detroit of my childhood. No,
Louis Armstrong on The Johnny Cash Show in 1970 © Everett Collection
everyone didn’t watch Lawrence Welk with
their grandmother like I did, but all the cool
cats I knew did watch the “Sullivan show”
every Sunday God sent, to see if any “of us”
were on it and dissect the quality of all the
acts. And people in my family were talking
about certain episodes of The Nat King Cole
show for years after it was off the air—and
it was barely on the air for a year.
After I met Johnny Cash on Fishing Creek
Island, I did not let him go. Wherever I was,
I tried to catch the show. I loved it for re-
minding me of Dear and Detroit. And I loved
Johnny Cash for Johnny Cash.
Johnny had O. C. Smith, Charley Pride, Ray
Charles, Louis Armstrong, Stevie Wonder,
Mahalia Jackson, Edwin Hawkins, and the
Staple Singers on the show. On his episode,
Louis walks on set swinging a white cowboy
hat while O. C. sings in front of a painting of
a modest country cabin, or perhaps it is a
barn, accompanied by a Black child about
my age. There’s a clip of that August 16, 1969,
episode on YouTube, and the O. C. Smith and
Solutions for
a healthy environment
start in the South.
child plus Johnny Cash version of “Son of on the record: there was a Black male body in pianist who grew up near Beale Street; who
Hickory Holler’s Tramp” is worth a listen half a the room when the “Blue Yodel” magic hap- studied music at Fisk; who wrote one of the
century later. Cash devoted whole episodes to pened in 1930. Then they prepare to reprise great jazz standards of all time, “Struttin’
songwriters and often talked about songwrit- the 1930 performance with a 1970 perfor- with Some Barbeque”; who had a number
ing. All this was an auspicious introduction to mance to underscore, to make visible and one when Ray Charles covered her song “Just
Nashville for me. Watching Johnny Cash on audible to Cash’s audience, the reality that for a Thrill” in 1959; and who had a posthu-
Fishing Creek was a first step on my journey there was Black presence as well as influence mous cut on Ringo Starr’s 1978 album Bad
to becoming a country songwriter. at the very beginning of recorded country Boy. The cut for which the album is named
I knew O. C. Smith, Louis Armstrong, music. Armstrong introduces the reprise is Ringo’s remix of Lil’s 1936 single “Brown
Stevie Wonder, Mahalia Jackson, Edwin with these words, “I will tell you what we’ll Gal.” That’s who Armstrong and Cash erase
Hawkins, and the Staple Singers from my do. We will say we give it to them in black from their early days of country story when
earlier childhood listening to Motown. Char- and white.” Then they—Louis Armstrong, they tell it on national television.
ley Pride was new to me. And so were some Johnny Cash, and Bill Walker—go on to play Don’t believe Lil was there? There’s proof.
of the women songwriters and singers on the classic, which includes the lyrics, “down The sheet music for the “Blue Yodel #9” ses-
the show—Joni Mitchell, Buffy Sainte-Marie, in Memphis, corner of Beale and Main.” sion has been located. On it, in Jimmie Rod-
and Jeannie C. Riley. Lulu I had adored from Cash sings and plays Jimmie Rodgers’s gers’s own handwriting (authenticated by
To Sir, with Love, a film I had seen in Detroit part. Louis plays Louis. Bill Walker plays the experts), the acknowledgement that “Louie’s
before moving to Washington in January of piano, plays Lil’s part. Yep, a Black woman is wife Lil” played the piano.
1968. Cass Elliot, Dusty Springfield, Jimmie Rodgers is often called the
Judy Collins, and Loretta Lynn made father of country music. For the work
the strongest positive impression All this was an she did on “Blue Yodel #9,” we need
on me. The Carter Family, Linda to start thinking about acknowledg-
Ronstadt, Brenda Lee, Patti Page, ing Lil as its midwife. I believe Lil
Lynn Anderson, and Tammy Wyn-
auspicious introduction may have written the version of “Blue
ette, who I would one day quote Yodel #9” played on the session. If
leaving my first husband, were far to Nashville for me. that is true, she is arguably, instead,
less interesting to me back then. a mother of country.
The men who interested me most? Watching Johnny Cash What is for sure: there is a Black
Johnny Cash, Merle Haggard, and presence at the very beginning, in
Kris Kristofferson. Kristofferson the seminal song—and most people
reminded me of the male teachers
on Fishing Creek was wouldn’t have known it if not for
in my hippie school, Georgetown Johnny Cash inviting Louis Arm-
Day School. a first step on my strong into a conversation intended
The Johnny Cash Show was my to correct lapses in the historical re-
soul-country primer. It only failed journey to becoming cord. Johnny Cash used music on the
me once. magic box of television to blast light
on the Black roots of country way
a country songwriter.
L et’s revisit the moment. October
28, 1970. Louis Armstrong is the
guest. The two men sit down to play what replaced by a white man in a song that refers
back in 1970.
The year Soul Train came on the
air, 1971, is the year The Johnny Cash Show,
many people consider to be the first great to laundry markings on a shirt—and if that’s The Ed Sullivan Show, and The Lawrence
country song, “Blue Yodel #9.” Armstrong not Black female Memphis signifying, well, Welk Show were canceled by their networks.
talks about being in Los Angeles and getting God didn’t make little green apples. And O.C. Born in 1959, I was raised on music from the
a phone call from Jimmie Rodgers inviting Smith didn’t sing some of his other big hits magic box of television. In the twenty-first
him to play on a session. on The Johnny Cash Show. century, I revisit my raising on a MacBook
“I’ve been knowing Jimmie for a long time Cash and Armstrong do an honorable and Pro tuned to YouTube.
and following up his music too and I woke powerful job of putting a Black body in the Recently I discovered a clip of LaVern
up one morning and Jimmie said, ‘Man I feel room where the “Blue Yodel” magic hap- Baker singing “Tweedlee Dee” on The Ed
like singing some blues y’know.’ I say, ‘OK, pened in 1930. Why then do they choose to Sullivan Show on November 20, 1955, four
Daddy, you sing some blues and I’m going erase the presence of the second Black body years before I was born. Some night soon I’m
to blow behind you,’ and that’s the way the in the room? Lil Hardin Armstrong, Louis dressing up, putting on perfume to watch,
record started, y’know.” Armstrong’s second wife, played on every listen, and wonder. Did Dear see this jewel
The recording session occurred July 16, bar of the song. the first time around?
1930. When Cash states, “You played trumpet I’ve seen pictures of Lil Hardin Armstrong One magic music box, television, sustained
on a session with the late Jimmie Rodgers, in Los Angeles with Louis around the time me through a complicated Motown child-
the father of country music,” there is gravitas of the Jimmie Rodgers recording session. hood; a different one, the laptop, sustains
in his tone. It seems Cash intends to set the She’s a stylish beauty, but she was far more me through the complications of my Music
record straight. Certainly, he gets a new fact than eye candy. She was a classically trained City mature age.

28 WINTER 2021
 Our Us (Three Syllables)
MADISON, WI: 1981
’m fourteen. It’s a quarter mile along
I Dwight Drive from our rented duplex
to the basketball court at Reindahl Park.
When it’s warm maybe I’m there more
than at home. The court sits at the crest
of the first hill just up from Rocky Rococo on
East Washington, the neighborhood sprawls
up the bluff beyond that to the north. Double
rims and chain nets. We play at whichever
30 WINTER 2021
BY ED PAVLI
end has less broken glass and sweep shards school we play whenever we can. At lunch
into the grass with our feet. The wind brings there might be like fifteen kids in the game.
the tangy pizza smell up to the park. Darryl There’s only one ball so you might touch the
comes down to the court. Marlon too.
We play a game to twenty-one at one
hoop. The game’s called hustle. Live shots
are worth two points and free throws from
the top of the key are worth one. We play
three and out. That means if you make three
free throws in a row then you get the ball
ball once maybe twice. Plus you keep track
of everyone’s score, especially who’s highest.
At school, games can last two or three lunch
periods. Scrubs cheat.
One ball with all those kids means our bod-
ies cross up and maybe don’t uncross, maybe
don’t come back all the way apart after lunch.
back and the other players play defense. At Like how I felt the slap from Walker punch-
Untitled (People Playing Basketball), 2017, acrylic on canvas, by Zhou Yilun.
Courtesy the artist and Beijing Commune
ing Toby’s layup over the fence and across
Spaight Street all through sixth period and
into science with Mr. Zeigler. When you get
the ball make it count. The S.O.S. Band on
the radio said take your time, do it right.
Like Yarbrough and Peoples: everything we
do is right on time. Sometimes Darryl’s big
brother Carrie and his friends come to the
court at Reindahl Park, or his sister Yvette.
They usually don’t stay. They live further up
the hill. Yvette stands behind the hoop and
talks. She says, “I’d play but I’m not trying to
sweat.” When she says that she looks down
and to the side and touches, slowly, three
fingers on her left hand to the back of her
neck. I feel that slowness on my neck. Last
Thursday Yvette left and came back twice;
she had on different clothes and shoes each
time. Yvette talks a lot.
If Carrie and them come to the park after
dinner they usually on their way across the
field to the west of the court and over the hill.
They go there at night and watch the drive-in
movies without paying. We play past sunset
until someone gets hit in the face because
we can’t see the ball. Sometimes we go over
there too. At first we just watch the mouths
and guess at what is going on. Carrie’s friends
come up with all kind of wild shit to say that
isn’t really what the movies are saying. No
matter what the movie is they make it sound
like all the characters are Black except if
they really white and then they say stupid
shit with squeaky voices like if you hold your
nose shut. Carrie and them drink out of dark
bottles they pass around and smoke dope that
smells like burning pine cones. Carrie always
wears that Montreal Expos helmet and in the
summer he pulls his shirt up over his head
with his arms still in the sleeves so the neck
hole stays on his back like a big open mouth
between his shoulders. I think he likes to
show off his muscles that disappear into the
string waist of his sweats. Carrie and them
are all grown they almost out of high school.
They always asking us in too-high voices
if we want some of what’s in the bottle but I
don’t and I don’t think they really mean it. I
say I’m an athlete. Everyone laughs. Some-
one’s hand on my head out of the dark and
a voice says, “I heard that, Lil Rock.” Carrie
and them might be nice one night and fake-
ask if we want some of what’s in their dark
bottle and the next time we see them they
might chase us. Sometimes, like on the bus,
if we see them coming we pretend we don’t.
Or we hide. We hold our breath till they pass
by. Then one week behind the drive-in some-
Listen to “Our Us,” an accompanying
playlist by Ed Pavlić, while you read.
one figures out how to tune Carrie’s friend’s
boom box to the drive-in signal and we start
to listen to the real movie. The characters
Carrie and them played were better.
Real late one night it looks like it might
rain but it doesn’t. And then it’s: “This movie
foul.” They turn off the movie sound and
play song after song and pass around that
pine-cone joint and it’s “livingitup-livingitup-
ohyeah, Friday night, livingitup-livingitup-
atlast” and then it isn’t “Friday night” it’s
“Ladies Night” and then it’s “Nights Over
Egypt” and “I Don’t Know If It’s Right.” The
radio calls it the “Universal Soul Explosion.”
89.9 WORT-FM. Someone says “this here our
shit.” Our: two syllables. Someone’s someone
laid back with her legs crossed and look-
ing like that “queen under the moonlight”
in the song just before says, “ooh this my
song!” And a song slows way down and a
voice sings up all high talking about “I do
love you, and it’s all right.” A chorus comes
in like clouds clear out the sky with “I do love
you—Iloveyou Iloveyou” and then everything
moving like scenes move underwater and it
seem like there are way more people here
than just the us that was here a minute ago.
That song goes on until Carrie starts
talking about he GQ down with that blue
Expos helmet on backward and holding a
dark green bottle instead of a mic. He act
like he singing about “like the little things
when your lady treat you so so good” in the
blue glow flickering from the movie like a
fire dying all off in the distance. Meantime
some dark nearby flame come to blaze; the
song floats over an easy beat talking ’bout
“shoo-be-doo-wop” and “remembering the
things we used to do, the places we used to
go, and everythang was so so mello-o-o.” I
didn’t really get that thing about so so good
little things and your lady or whatever but I
could feel that so so mello-o-o everythang.
Sure as shit. I look around and it seem like
Carrie and them sure feel it too.
Now this was close again. I’d sought it since
I was too little to know. Another kind of close,
a whole ’nother level. Another kind of way
life moves that moved and you move with it.
A kind of crossed up that don’t cross back
out like in those big games of hustle at lunch
but different.
’Cause this was also another kind of you
that moved. I guessed this was our you like
Carrie’s boy said the music was “our shit.”
Three syllables. Maybe it was in the music.
Maybe not. Maybe it was in us. Our us. So
that means there’s a Our me? That’s where
Scan the code within the Spotify app or visit Oxford
American Magazine on Spotify to stream the playlist.
I first remember feeling the space between
all of us fill up with something we couldn’t
see. And like suddenly there were way more
of us than just before. I close my eyes and
something pulls me into it and feels almost
like I’m disappeared but also like there’s way
more of me. Like we were all moving. But we
were all right there the whole time. Maybe
that was it: we were right there. Maybe that
was it: the whole time. Time come to blaze—
darkly and whole.
If I think about it, that felt like the moved
way the world moves now, like the waves
and echoes I carried home from the beach
in L.A. last summer and the cars, suddenly,
with round hips and smooth shoulders on
Wilshire. Me and my mom went there to be
with my dad who had a job at the Budweiser
Brewery in Van Nuys. But we lived by the
beach. Eleventh and Idaho. And then that
thing that happened when I started to rub on
myself in the bathroom like out of nowhere
all of a sudden like I was somebody else who’d
been living inside me the whole time. Like
he was right there.
This new moving invisible fluid thing be-
tween us all felt like it came from some long
warm way far away. But also like it came from
someplace close, a place too close to feel, too
close to know anything about. Close to what?
And how could something be too close to feel
too close to know anything about? So when
this moved moving moves like it moves it felt
like close was far and far was close and they
both move toward each other. And it felt like
that “each other” they was moving toward
was me. Moving. Right there. Our me. Three
syllables. The whole time. And that me was
somebody else—like pieces of songs broke
off and repeated—inside me and breaks of
me living inside somebody else was all of
us, our us, and everythang so so mello-o-o.
And no I don’t know if it’s right. But it’s true.
So our me was happening between each
other, a moved way of moving. And close.
And somehow there’s way more of our us
than just us.
When we play ball at the park the wind’s
a problem but it is what it is. Wind or not I
ride down there on my bike spinning the
ball on my finger. I pedal no-handed and sit
straight up. I flick the ball with quick motions
of my left hand. I can feel myself doing this
for everyone looking. No one’s looking. But
I can still feel it like someone is looking. Let
’em look and even if it’s no one still let ’em
look. I wonder do the waves at the beach
know when you’re watching? Or do they
OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 31
really rise, curl and foam and echo all the
time even if you’re not there? The whole
time. The quick tips of my fingers graze the
brown skin of the ball just enough to make
it spin faster but not enough to knock it off.
Something in its spinning keeps it there.
Right there. Like that other “this here our
shit” song said, just a touch, just a little bit—
it’s in my mind, just a little bit.
I’d always played all the sports. Especial-
ly football. We played in the field, even on
gravel if there was enough snow. We played
baseball: two-on-two, no right field and sup-
ply your own pitcher; or one-on-one, STRIKE
OUT, against the dumpster in the Holiday
Inn parking lot right behind the duplex on
Dwight Drive. But, last year, when I got back
from California for eighth grade carrying
that moved way of moving it turned out the
way sports moves had moved too. And foot-
ball was just a big-ass fight. So, soon, it
was all about basketball. Like in them big
all-crossed-up-that-won’t-cross-back-out
games of hustle at lunch. Everything con-
nected. You step out and guard someone
with the ball and they score in your eye
and don’t let it be point game and every-
body got something to say about what
happened to your face. All day. And don’t
step out and let it be Odelle’s shooting-
and-he-don’t-even-look-at-the-hoop ass
and he scores all in your eye and then
everyone talking about that—yeah it was
like that before.
But it wasn’t like this before. I mean be-
fore this our us warm fluid thing between
everyone. The crossed-up thing in our
arms and legs that don’t uncross. That so
close thing that’s so close it’s too far away to
feel by yourself so you gonna need somebody
else. That more of us than you can see thing.
Boom box and basketball: “it’s up my back
it’s around my neck.” Sugar Hill Sugar Hill. A
thousand beats and rhythms. Jocko and them
looking like the Time leaning against the wall
of the gym talking about they GQ down with
they wet curls and Jazzman suits and racing
bikes: Yellow Jersey; Campagnolo. S-curl.
Smooth with a vee. Jocko’s big box banging:
“Spread it with some jel-ly. Peanut butter,
can’t be beat!” A thousand ways to almost
touch somebody. “Share, share with me.”
Someone says “play that Twennynine again!”
And then Junior quits the game and goes all
fluid-boned and locking robot moves right
there on the court. Man that boy can float.
Or even just the ball itself. The slip-sound
of nylon in the gym. Thwap. The tight catch
32 WINTER 2021
of the chain net at the park. Or get the rim.
Or even just hold the ball still and watch
it. Like you care, or “worse.” Flick it with
your wrist and just watch. The whole time,
ablaze, and the right way to touch is mostly
something soft in the tips of your fingers,
perfect backspin on the ball. The whole
time that’s what it was. Take it to the bridge:
“Can I have the peanut butter? Of course you
can.” Like something with no name moved
along with you, like something you almost
touched could touch you almost soft enough
to backspin you back and everythang so so
mello-o-o—Master Gee: “a touch of lightning
a taste of fire.”
And now, in the game, the voices got waves
like at the beach curling into foam with low
echoes. Like our voices are also made of hips,
shoulders, the way Gene’s calves got shark
fins, and maybe “worse.” In a way it feels
That’s where I first
remember feeling
the space between
all of us fill up
with something
we couldn’t see.
deep to step out—like there’s danger in it.
Danger inside it. Like something else in ev-
eryone else is watching. Like all of us—our
us—isn’t just what it was and now each other
is maybe everything but me; or it’s like we’re
all scrambled pieces of each other just as
much as we even really ourselves like “one
for the trouble two for the time” like songs
cut together by Flash on the wheels of steel.
Or almost. The whole time. “Flash two times:
‘good. good.’” Or like in the bathroom by
myself and like what’s gonna happen next!?
And don’t stop the music ok but why can’t
I stop? Till it’s over and then when it’s over
it’s almost like it’s already started again. Like
wet waves of S-curls at the beach if you’re
there and probably even if you’re not. And I
don’t know if it’s right. But it’s true.
I know the truth by waves and echoes and
that invisible fluid between us.
Don’t tell me. Tell Junior ’cause you know
Junior will tell me. Our me.
I remember last year thinking all these
was games. And I mean they still games but
something’s moved, the way they—the way
we—move has moved. And now something’s
driving the moves from inside. From way far
off inside whatever that means. And inside
what? Inside us I guess. Our us. Three syl-
lables: yeah it’s wrong on the test. Wrong or
not it’s right there. The whole time. And all of
a sudden there’s way more of us than there
were. Our us. There’s some electrical-feeling
thing going on between us. That space I’d felt
filling up and everythang so so mello-o-o
at the park with Carrie and them is always
there between us now. And always was but
then how far back does always was go? I
don’t know how far but wherever it goes
back to you could say that’s where this our
me is from. It’s wrong on the test but so
is the test; always was.
Naw you still can’t see our moved way
of moving move but it feels thick till you
could almost swim up off the ground and
float—all off up into it. Or drown in it. Or
fight about it.
Or lose it and be lost forever.
You mean lost like them?
Maybe.
Like if all of a sudden you were some-
one lost living inside a stranger who lost
and lives inside a stranger who lost. They
out there. You can feel them ’cause you
can’t feel them. No one says anything
about this. But I know it’s not just me. Not
even just our me. Or maybe everything
everyone says is about this. Because it’s
like everything our everyone says is sud-
denly thick or smooth (with a vee) or salty
or sweet with this. With this—us. Our us,
and something from way far away inside
is watching. And something else—maybe
something lost forever—inside something
else watches that. Yeah, watches but can’t
see it. Like the song about the queen under
the Egyptian moonlight sang: “Your eyes
won’t believe what your mind can’t con-
ceive.” Can’t see that to watch any one of
our us is to see all of us. And that means,
forever, each of us smuggles our us into
doorways labeled: ADMIT ONE. So if you
see me it’s not me. It’s our me. And if you
can’t see that you don’t know me and then
I wonder about you.
Our us. The whole time, ablaze, right here.
And all them lost ones they can’t see it not
even with a telescope.
GEORGE GRUHN (pictured) understood from an early age the importance
of a musician’s need to play an instrument they love. He descibes
Gruhn Guitars as an adoption agency for instruments — making sure
each one finds the right home for over 50 years.
 Alvin Ailey
Finds
His Voice
BY MARK BURFORD

S
ometime during the early months
of 1961, Alvin Ailey, a thirty-year-
old African American dancer and
aspiring actor, walked past Gerde’s
Folk City—the New York venue Bob
Dylan called “the preeminent folk club in
America”—and was stopped in his tracks.
Ailey was heading home from rehearsal for
the William Saroyan play Talking to You at
the East End Theater four blocks away: “I
used to go through Washington Square Park
in Greenwich Village to get to the subway,
and one day I passed by this club called Folk
City and heard a voice singing ‘[In the] Eve-
ning When the Sun Goes Down,’ one of my
favorite blues songs.” The voice belonged
to John Sellers, a Mississippi-born migrant
to Chicago, who, following the example of
gospel songster Sister Rosetta Tharpe, added
“Brother” to his stage name. He eventually
found his way to New York, where he became
a fixture at Gerde’s as both a performer and
an emcee.
A frumpy cabaret tucked on the corner
of West 4th and Mercer Streets, Gerde’s
brought together bohemia and the blues,
booking the likes of Dylan, Pete Seeger, conjured by Sellers’s voice—above all, the remember, admonish, implore, testify, and
Joan Baez, and John Lee Hooker alongside landmark Revelations. rejoice. Built around sequences of African
local favorites for patrons who ate, drank, The historical importance of Revelations is American religious songs—including two in
smoked, and sang along from the club’s secure. It has become the best-known—surely the final section sung by Sellers—the work,
densely packed tables. Ailey vividly recalled the most-watched—American concert dance as Langston Hughes described it, “explores
the night he heard Sellers: “I said to myself, of all time, performed continuously by Alvin motivations and emotions of American Negro
‘Who the hell is that singing?’ I started stop- Ailey American Dance Theater (AAADT) religious music.” Even more, it is a work that
ping by the club all the time to listen to for sixty years. For many of the countless pointedly brought to audiences across the
Brother John sing.” The back-home familiar- millions who have seen the dance, its im- country and around the world rituals of a
ity that Sellers’s sound summoned for Ailey, ages and choreography are indelible; the Black South embraced by many as a point of
who was raised in southeast Texas about huddled bodies, individuated yet allied, with origin. For a cohort of race-conscious African
fifty miles south of Waco, harmonized with outstretched arms and splayed fingers in its Americans who got to know the work in the
the vision that he was eager to pursue in incantational opening scene, conveying a 1960s, the sight and sound of Revelations
original pieces for his new dance company, sense of shared history and collective aspi- were a powerful cultural-political touchstone.
works weaving together his choreography, ration, come quickly to mind. But Revela- Robert Maurice Riley’s review of a 1974 perfor-
his attraction to theater, and the memories tions is also haunted by voices, voices that mance, written for the New York Amsterdam

Brother John Sellers performing at Gerde's Folk City on May 24, 1964.
34 WINTER 2021 Photo by Irwin Gooen. Courtesy Mitch Blank
News, took a personal turn to convey to the
paper’s Black readership Revelations’ spirit
of convocation. “On these special evenings,
and you are Black, and you are sitting proudly
in the City Center Theatre,” Riley reflected,
“you say quietly to yourself (Some have even
said it aloud!), ‘Umm-hmm. This is me. This is
where I come from.’”
Bookended by these generative encoun-
ters—Ailey finding a voice resounding with
Black vernacular sensibilities and soul-era au-
diences empowered by music and movement
that affirmed the distinctiveness of African
American cultural expression—Revelations’
first decade as a concert dance was nour-
ished by the meeting of two Black southerners
whose work together bridged time and place,
for each other and for generations to come.
A iley’s “deepest memories” were of Rog-
ers, the Texas town where he was born
on January 5, 1931. With a population of nine
hundred and covering a single square mile
in Bell County, Rogers was home to Black
residents who earned a tough living picking
cotton during the week then blew off steam
listening to bluesmen like Tampa Red and
Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup at a local juke joint
called the Dew Drop Inn. At the heart of Rog-
ers’s social life, however, was the church. “It
was the center of my community. The church
was always very important, very theatrical,
very intense,” said Ailey. “The life that went
on there and the music made a great impres-
sion on me.” These spheres of Black life were
distinct yet in constant dialogue, both in
Rogers and in Ailey’s artistic imagination:
“Many of the same people who went to the
Dew Drop Inn on Saturday night went to
church on Sunday morning. In dance I deal
with these two very different worlds.”
At twelve, Ailey migrated to Los Angeles in
1942 when his mother, Lula Cooper, sought
financial stability through work in the war-
time aircraft industry. There he met Carmen
de Lavallade, a high school friend and artistic
partner with whom he moved to New York in
1954 to appear as lead dancers in the Harold
Arlen and Truman Capote musical House of
Flowers and to pursue new creative projects.
In 1958, Ailey started his own company, for
which he created Blues Suite, an ensemble
dance that put him on the map as a chore-
ographer. Within months of his chance en-
counter with Sellers at Gerde’s in 1961, Ailey
went back to the blues, inspired by a “love
affair I’ve always had with these songs,” and
embraced the singer as a collaborating muse
Listen to “Alvin Ailey Finds His Voice,” an accompanying
playlist by Mark Burford, while you read.
for a new work: “I told him that I wanted to
do a dance called Roots of the Blues, and I
would love to have him sing for me.”
Roots of the Blues premiered in June 1961
at the Boston Arts Festival as part of a pan-
orama of twentieth-century American dance.
A late addition to the program—identified
only by the placeholder title “Jazz Piece” in
advance publicity—Roots of the Blues was a
pas de deux with de Lavallade that further
explored “the pain, desolation, frustrations,
heart-aches, lost-love and social discontent
of the Southern Negro.” In each of the work’s
five sections—“Waiting,” “Jack of Diamonds,”
“In the Evening,” “Backwater Blues,” and
“Mean Ole Frisco”—Ailey and de Lavallade
danced to songs sung by Sellers. No docu-
mentation of Roots of the Blues has survived,
but de Lavallade remembered the piece as
Ailey’s “gem, his best piece” and the audi-
ence reaction as overwhelming: “the whole
Boston Commons went cuckoo. We stopped
the show.” For Ailey, the duet was in fact
a trio: “We had with us in its creation the
inspired singing of Brother John Sellers,
who brought a truth and beauty to these
marvellous songs.”
S ellers was born on May 27, 1924, in Clarks-
dale, Mississippi, to a mother who moved
without him to New Orleans after the cata-
strophic 1927 flood, leaving him to be raised
by his godmother who ran a brothel and
rented out her property to traveling Black
vaudeville shows. He was still a small child in
the early 1930s when an aunt followed one of
the well-beaten paths of the Great Migration
and took him to Chicago, where, orphaned
again, he was taken in by gospel great and
New Orleans native Mahalia Jackson, whom
he had admired from afar and met on the
street while wandering the South Side. In
effect, Jackson became Sellers’s surrogate
mother as well as a formative musical men-
tor under whose tutelage he developed an
open-throated, rhythmically driven singing
style closely modeled on Jackson. Her first
two singles, cut for Decca in 1937, included
“God’s Gonna Separate the Wheat from the
Tares” and “Oh, My Lord” (aka “Sing On,
My Singer”). When the twenty-year-old Sell-
ers made his own studio debut eight years
later, he sang the same two songs back to
back, making his first record a two-sided
cover of Jackson’s debut. As Chicago engage-
ments became too numerous for Jackson to
handle, she sometimes sent Sellers as a sub.
The first version of Jackson’s breakthrough
Scan the code within the Spotify app or visit Oxford
American Magazine on Spotify to stream the playlist.
megahit “Move On Up a Little Higher” was in
fact recorded in 1946 by Sellers, who surely
plucked it from Jackson’s song list. But un-
like Jackson, who conspicuously rebuffed
invitations to sing the blues, Sellers had no
qualms about Black popular music. Forg-
ing an independent career in the decade
after World War II, he recorded alternately
as “Brother John Sellers” and “Big Johnny
Sellers,” cutting tracks that toggled back and
forth between venerable church songs and
the latest rhythm and blues, from “Pilgrim
of Sorrow” and “Precious Lord” to “Busy
Bootin’” and “The Right Kind of Loving.”
In the mid-1950s, Sellers, billed as “Mahalia
Jackson’s protégé” and “a lusty singer of deep
south songs,” caught the folk revival wave in
Chicago and began to repackage himself as
a folk singer. If Saturday night belonged to
the blues and Sunday morning was gospel
time, Mondays were set aside for folk mu-
sic. In 1953, Sellers, still only twenty-eight,
joined the cast of the Studs Terkel–hosted
weekly folk song floor show I Come for to
Sing, presented Monday evenings at Chi-
cago’s Blue Note nightclub. Meanwhile, in
New York, Monday nights at Gerde’s were
becoming a magnet for folkies drawn to
hootenannies hosted by the now-relocated
Sellers, who juiced the crowd by dispensing
hand-clapping gospel numbers and vestigial
blues of the kind that caught Ailey’s ear.
Whether because of stylistic continuities
across genres or his own enterprise, Sellers,
well before his long association with AAADT,
had established his brand as a flexible vocalist
capable of giving voice to an array of African
American song traditions.
Despite his carefully cultivated success, a
slight shade of skepticism always seemed to
follow Sellers. Chicago was the preeminent
Black gospel town, bursting with dynamic
soloists, quartets, and groups. A base of
operation for Thomas A. Dorsey, who was
the musical and entrepreneurial face of the
emerging interwar modern gospel song
movement, and home of the pioneering
choirs established in 1932 at Ebenezer and
Pilgrim Baptist Churches, Chicago boasted
a thriving scene as notable for competition
as for camaraderie. On a given night in the
1950s, one might hear Jackson, Sam Cooke
with the Soul Stirrers, or the Caravans with
Albertina Walker and James Cleveland—per-
haps going toe to toe on the same program.
Some gospel singers there, already dubious
about his fence-straddling, looked askance
at Sellers, believing his choice opportunities
OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 35
came not from distinctive talent but because
he feasted on crumbs from Jackson’s table.
Similarly, in New York, certain members of
the Gerde’s crowd, particularly young white
male musicians who studied hungrily at the
feet of older Black master practitioners like
Mississippi John Hurt and South Carolina
native Blind Reverend Gary Davis—singer-
guitarists whose careers were resurrected
by the 1960s blues revival—also had their
doubts. “I never took Brother John Sellers
very seriously as an artist, to be truthful,”
banjo player Dick Weissman mused, remem-
bering Sellers’s reception among a circle of
Gerde’s regulars who found his act to be
less rootsy than shtick. “I think part of the
problem with Brother John is that a lot of
us…were really into Gary Davis and Gary
Davis seemed to us to have, I don’t know, a lot
36 WINTER 2021
more soul, a lot more to offer.” Sellers’s most
valuable capital may have been his skill as a
Black vernacular musical pharmacist willing
and able to fill whatever prescription crossed
his counter, though for some observers his
cultural fluency veered dangerously close to
inauthentic stylistic promiscuity.
But if Sellers-cynics detected self-con-
scious mannerism, Ailey heard true grit, “a
Mississippian who sang the blues with real
dirt in his voice.” For Ailey, questions of style
were secondary to the preeminence of place.
Ailey’s deep emotional ties to what he often
referred to as the “blood memories” of his
Texas upbringing, choreographed in Roots
of the Blues and Revelations, helped forge
the most immediate and visceral attachment
to Sellers, with whom he shared a “tremen-
dous love for and respect for the music”
Photo by Jack Mitchell from Alvin Ailey’s Roots of the Blues. From left to right: Carmen de Lavallade, Brother John Sellers, Alvin
Ailey, and Bruce Langhorne © Alvin Ailey Dance Foundation and the Smithsonian Institution
that became “a very strong connection with
them.” Mutual reminiscences of “holy roller”
churches, street corner singers, and touring
tent shows—both recalled seeing the Silas
Green Minstrels as children—bonded the
two men. Around the time they met, Ailey
wrote the poem “John Sellers Sings” in trib-
ute to his new friend and collaborator. De
Lavallade, who described Sellers’s voice as
“rooted in the earth,” noted the fortuitous
timing of their acquaintance: “It was where
Alvin wanted to go. He wanted to do all the
things of the South.”
A forerunner of Ailey’s celebration of south-
ern Black life was Zora Neale Hurston’s
1932 folk concert “The Great Day,” a snap-
shot of an African American community
at a southern Florida railroad camp. Not
strictly a concert dance, “The Great Day”
staged Hurston’s anthropological and folk-
loric research by blending spoken dialogue,
music, and Hurston’s own choreography. The
performance anticipated Blues Suite and
Revelations most notably through the inclu-
sion of sung spirituals, a section featuring a
sermon by an itinerant minister, and a scene
set in a local pleasure house reminiscent of
the Dew Drop Inn.
Ailey “did extensive research, listened
to a lot of music, [and] dug even deeper
into my early Texas memories” to create
Revelations, which premiered at Kaufmann
Concert Hall in New York on January 31,
1960. Because of the costume colors, Ailey
dancers commonly identify the three major
sections of Revelations—“Pilgrim of Sor-
row,” “Take Me to the Water,” and “Move,
Members, Move!”—as the “brown section,”
“white section,” and “yellow section,” respec-
tively. Each is choreographed to a short set of
songs. A supplication for spiritual liberation,
“Pilgrim of Sorrow” is set to the spirituals
“I’ve Been ’Buked and I’ve Been Scorned,”
“Didn’t My Lord Deliver Daniel,” and “Fix
Me, Jesus.” Ailey’s inspiration for “Take Me
to the Water” was his memory of watching
baptisms in Rogers. “I was held spellbound
by the swaying of white garbed acolytes,
going to the river to be submerged and born
anew,” Ailey recalled, and the section fea-
tures “Honor, Honor,” “Wade in the Water,”
and “I Wanna Be Ready,” the latter a gripping
solo for male dancer.
Originally a sixty-five-minute ballet, too
long for a program of other works, Ailey
trimmed Revelations to the thirty-minute
suite known today. The most comprehensive
change in the condensed version of Revela-
tions was a radical makeover of the now
famous yellow section, danced to live music
to accommodate the presence of Sellers.
None of the songs from the 1960 premiere
of the concluding “Move, Members, Move!”
were kept. Instead, it now began with “Sin-
ner Man” and its tense warning of divine
retribution. Added as well were two songs
recommended and sung by Sellers—“The
Day Is Passed and Gone” and “You May
Run On for a Long Time”—chosen, Sellers
explained, to capture “the way it’s done in
the typical South today and in many of the
smaller churches who keep up with the old
traditionals around Chicago.” In present-day
AAADT performances, Sellers continues to
be credited as a co-arranger of these two
musical numbers.
With its dynamic and diverse movement
vocabulary, theatrical staging, live music,
and more concise presentation, the revised
Revelations was made-for-TV dance. On
March 4, 1962, Revelations was broadcast na-
tionally on the CBS Sunday morning program
Lamp Unto My Feet, then the longest-running
religious series on television. It was a coming
out of sorts for the dance and a document
of Sellers’s close work with the Ailey com-
pany. In Revelations, CBS advertised in major
newspapers, “Spirituals and gospel songs and
the dances they have inspired are brought
together…against dramatic backgrounds of
the Deep South.”
The climactic final section took viewers to
church. As “Move, Members, Move!” opened
on the black-and-white Lamp broadcast, the
scene-shifting sound of gospel piano accom-
panied a close-up of a wood-framed church,
further layered with barbershop-style banter
by Black men’s voices calling on members to
“Praise the Lord with the dance.” The camera
finally settled on Sellers, dressed as a robed
minister, standing solemnly and motionless
at a pulpit with both palms resting on the
lectern. With slight reverb adding a hint of
gravitas to his voice, Sellers initiated the ac-
tion by singing the brooding Dr. Watts hymn
familiar among Baptists, “The Day Is Passed
and Gone,” a lugubrious dirge backed by the
harmonized moans of the off-camera Howard
Roberts Chorale. The camera slowly pulled
back to show the eight dancers, including
Ailey himself, sitting on stools, fanning, rock-
ing, and assenting as members of Sellers’s
feeling-the-spirit congregation.
The meditative mood was broken and the
dancers were set into motion by Sellers kick-
ing off a new song, “You May Run On for
a Long Time,” an up-tempo, jubilee staple
popular among postwar male quartets. The
tune was right in Sellers’s wheelhouse and the
influence of Jackson’s gospel swing was on
full display in the syncopated rhythmic play
of Sellers singing over the song’s stop-time
verses. Together, the two songs simulated an
invocation and sermon; AAADT programs
identify the latter as a “Preaching Spiritual.”
Revelations concluded with the escalating
jubilation of “Rocka My Soul in the Bosom of
Abraham”—part modern dance, part country
reel—sung during the broadcast by the Rob-
erts Chorale, with Sellers as a soloist during
the verses. The revamped “Move, Members,
Move!” and the conspicuous showcasing of
Sellers, the only non-dancer seen on screen,
suggests that shortly after meeting the singer,
Ailey, eager to incorporate his voice into
Revelations, took Sellers’s recommendation
of songs that would best enable him to do
so and overhauled the final church scene
accordingly.
T he years following their appearance on
Lamp Unto My Feet saw the Ailey com-
pany’s irrepressible rise from an exciting
novelty troupe to a modern dance pow-
erhouse. As the Sixties unfolded, AAADT
built an international reputation through the
rapturous response to their performances
during high-profile tours of Europe, Latin
America, Africa, and the Soviet Union. In
1962, the U.S. State Department, which had
initially balked at a group “not of the caliber
to bear any designation as the official repre-
sentation from the United States,” sent the
Ailey company on a fifteen-week, ten-country
cultural diplomacy tour of Southeast Asia
and Australia. Three of the works that the
group took with them—Roots of the Blues,
Revelations, and a new folksong-based dance
created by Ailey especially for the tour, Been
Here and Gone—featured Sellers singing on-
stage, playing prescribed characters in each
theatrical setting. Sellers’s tightening bond
with the Ailey group was evident when the
company performed their State Department
repertory in advance of the trip, billed in the
concert program as “The Alvin Ailey Dance
Theatre starring Carmen de Lavallade and
Brother John Sellers.” Ailey consistently pro-
grammed the work of other choreographers,
and he composed dances to music ranging
from Duke Ellington to British composer
Ralph Vaughan Williams to singer-songwriter
Laura Nyro. Propelling his success in these
early years above all, however, was the re-
ception of Revelations, a work critics were
already hailing as Ailey’s “masterpiece” and
the company’s “signature dance.”
Far from transcendent art, Revelations
was deeply enmeshed in its dynamic histori-
cal moment. As the influential critic Clive
Barnes observed, times were changing, as
modern dance in the U.S. for the first time
witnessed the emergence of a small handful
of “super-companies,” led by Paul Taylor,
Merce Cunningham, Martha Graham, and
Ailey. “The growing popularity of modern
dance, coupled with the growing interest in
black artists,” another writer noted in 1970,
uniquely set the stage for Ailey. AAADT’s
commemoration of the African American
experience resonated with the late-Sixties
soul era and Black Arts Movement, rooted
OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 37
in a cultural pride and racial consciousness
that were a call to arms and a shout-out to
Black audiences from within even main-
stream popular culture. If concert dance
retained its reputation as an elite white in-
stitution, Ailey and his dancers staked their
claim as African American culture bearers,
appearing on the Black-targeted public
television shows On Being Black, Like It
Is, and Soul!. On the enormously popular
Soul! in 1974, during a special episode titled
“Alvin Ailey: Memories and Visions,” Ailey was
unequivocal both about his origins—“I’m a
black man whose roots are in the sun and the
dirt of the South”—and about the central-
ity of the blues, the gospel church, and the
voice of “the incomparable Brother John I Am Bound for de Kingdom
Sellers” to the artistic vision of his southern-
themed works. BY MARLANDA DEKINE
At the same time, whatever the perceived
singularity of the Ailey company, “Black —after Florence Price and Marian Anderson
dance” was still under negotiation. In the
late Sixties and early Seventies, Black danc- My granddaddy Silas was born on the Nightingale plantation
ers and choreographers were actively theo- in Plantersville, South Carolina, on riverbanks that loved
rizing and organizing, seeking to establish three generations of my kin, captured
equal standing within the broader profes- in a green-tinted photograph, hanging in my daddy’s den.
sional dance field while also determined to
build autonomous institutions that would Tonight, my eyes will take each old-world bird from the cropped space,
support culturally relevant domains of send them home with their songs and favorite foods.
practice and criteria for evaluation. “What
is and/or can be the role of dance in our Look out for me I’m a-coming too
Black world?” the Black dance newsletter
The Feet asked in 1970. “What is the role of with rice, okra, hard-boiled eggs, and Lord Calvert.
the dancer in the up and coming, already My daddy says if I get out of my car on Nightingale land,
existing situation that we as Black people the folks who own it might shoot. My daddy says,
live in today?” For Ailey, dance theater held “Never leave the driveway.”
the potential to mobilize individual and
shared memories of “Black roots” in the Glory into my soul
rural South. But the particular contribu-
tion of Revelations is brought into focus I watch all of my ascendants. Their faces reflecting me
when the work is considered in counter- in that photograph. Their eyes are dead
point with alternate approaches to “Black black-eyed Susans.
dance” taken by Ailey’s accomplished, if
less visible, contemporaries. These includ-
ed such dancer-choreographers as Arthur
Mitchell, whose Dance Theatre of Harlem
was founded, somewhat controversially, to
wed Black bodies and classical ballet tech-
nique; Eleo Pomare, who sought to docu-
ment the stark realism of modern Black
urban life from the inside and on its own
terms; Rod Rodgers, who, determined not
to be a “professional black man,” pursued
non-representational abstraction unbe-
holden to “simplified traditional images”;
and Katherine Dunham and Babatunde Ola-
tunji, for whom Black dance was inescapably
Afro-diasporic dance.

38 WINTER 2021
 Understood in this context, the meteoric
success of the Ailey company raised pressing
questions within African American dance
communities about the politics of origins
and of audiences. African traditional dance
and Afrocentric thought were at the height
of their popularity in the late 1960s, making
Ailey’s explicit claiming of the U.S. South as
a Black homeland a distinct, perhaps even
maverick, vision for its time. The subject
matter, staginess, and eclectic technique of
many Ailey dances enhanced their acces-
sibility, a feature of Revelations that was
occasionally received with some ambiva-
lence. AAADT’s “dazzlingly theatrical and
popular” style offered “dance for audiences
that assuredly don’t like dance,” an otherwise
supportive reviewer conceded. “The purists
get uncomfortable. The audiences inevitably
cheer.” The Colombian-born Pomare, who
professed, “I don’t create works to amuse
white crowds, nor do I wish to show them
how charming, strong, and folksy Negro
people are,” expressed his own skepticism of
the crowd-pleasing “romanticism” of works
like Revelations: “I have deliberately stayed
away from Ailey’s concerts for years, because
I am not so interested in the ‘razzle dazzle’
commercialism.”
Ailey held that the cross-cultural appeal
of company repertory based on memoires of
his Texas upbringing was a strength. Even
as leading advocates of the Black Arts Move-
ment, like theater scholar Larry Neal, called
for “art that speaks directly to the needs
and aspirations of Black America,” with an
aesthetic grounded in “a separate symbol-
ism, mythology, critique, and iconology,”
Ailey insisted that Revelations “speaks to
everyone,” despite the specificity of its cul-
tural reference. “There’s nothing blacker
than the blues,” Ailey told Soul!’s viewers,
and yet “blues are global and universal.”
With white critics fond of casting Pomare
as the angry Black man of modern dance,
their praise of Ailey’s integrated company
could sound like a proxy rebuke of Black
nationalist politics. Ailey “is no black apostle
of apartheid,” wrote an approving Barnes,
“and I love him for it.”
Still, for many African Americans, Rev-
elations extended an invitation to self-
recognition in spaces where they were too
infrequently recognized. Whatever the re-
ception by white audiences, Riley’s review
of AAADT’s 1974 season at New York’s City
Center acknowledged the pride and cathar-
sis of watching the company. Riley was at-
tending a special Ailey concert titled “In the
Black Tradition,” which he described as “an
entire two hours of dance that relate directly
and specifically to ‘The Black Experience.’”
He reveled in the thrill of a whole program
featuring nothing but Black choreographers,
including Pearl Primus, Donald McKayle,
and Dunham, as well as the live music in
Ailey’s own Blues Suite and Revelations.
“Then you hear the ‘down home’ voice of
Brother John Sellers singing the Blues and
‘Holy Spirits’ with clarity and verve,” Riley
concluded, “and when you hear ALL this,
I’m afraid you don’t give a damn whether
the OTHER people in the audience under-
stand it or not.”
By 1964, Ailey had added Sellers’s voice
to his first blues-based dance and one of
his most programmed pieces, Blues Suite,
which in tandem with Revelations solidified
the connection of Sellers with the company
over the course of their nearly forty-year
relationship. Sellers continued to perform
live with AAADT off and on into the 1990s,
though his voice was more and more often
heard recorded. But for the company’s major
events—their first Broadway appearance at
the Billy Rose Theater in 1969, their Lincoln
Center debut in 1974, their participation
in Jimmy Carter’s presidential inaugura-
tion gala in 1977—he was a fixture. With
his confidence perhaps boosted by affili-
ations with better-known stars—among
them Jackson, Dylan, and blues musician
Big Bill Broonzy—Sellers never lacked a
sense of self-importance. In future years,
he haggled with AAADT over intellectual
property disagreements, having claimed,
“I laid out the outlines of Revelations.” He
told an interviewer that Gerde’s and the
blues revival circuit in Europe had made
him “famous” but he “gave all that up” to
help a fledgling dance company at a time
when the public didn’t “know nothing about
Alvin Ailey.”
A more measured assessment is that Sell-
ers’s close association with Ailey helped to
reboot his reception. Despite listeners who
perceived something studied, affected, op-
portunistic, or even second-rate in Sellers’s
vocal performances, hearing his voice as
part of Ailey’s documentation of the Black
experience helped make what may have
seemed bygone and remote feel proximate.
“Within the black dance cultural world in
New York, everybody knew Brother John.
Everybody knew him. He was tremendously
respected,” Ailey biographer A. Peter Bailey
said in 2011. “He was a legend because he
was connected with Revelations. Everybody
who went to Revelations heard him sing.”
Bailey recalled how he and his peers em-
braced Sellers as an elder, as a living link
to a southern past memorialized in Ailey’s
work, who corroborated cherished beliefs
about Black music: “He was that person who
knows how to do the gospel and the blues
because they come out of almost the exact
same source, one religious and one secular.
And he could do it as well as anybody I had
ever heard.” Sellers’s canny triangulation
of performance personas—embodying Sat-
urday night, Sunday morning, and Monday
night—paid off, both as a career strategy
and as an asset in Ailey’s exploration of
interwoven Black vernacular musical tradi-
tions through dance theater.
T he staying power of Revelations as an
iconic American dance might be ex-
plained by how it sits at an ambiguous in-
tersection of testimony and mythology. Cit-
ing memories and visions of people, places,
and rituals he had personally known, Ailey
crafted a form of storytelling through images,
movement, and music that could bear witness
to the rural southern culture of his youth for
New York audiences. Notably, Ailey, like Hur-
ston, sought to represent a distinctively Black
South that flourished and aspired beyond the
gaze and narratives of white southerners. It
is also provocative to register that Ailey’s
southern memories were voice-shaped. For
most, Sellers is but a footnote, if that, in
the story of the Ailey company, one of their
many collaborators over the years. But the
visibility, longevity, and priority of his pres-
ence in AAADT’s southern repertory indicate
the intimate relationship between voice and
memory for Ailey.
The mobility and archival span of Sell-
ers’s singing—doing gospel, doing blues,
doing folk—and even the variance in what
people heard when Brother John sang, sug-
gest a sense of voice that is less about a stable
presence than a space of possibilities. In-
spired by memory, Revelations serves up a
delicious fantasy in which we are immersed
in dance but also in ideas about southern
Blackness, whether romanticized or po-
litically potent. It was perhaps the fluidity
and capaciousness of voice as practiced by
Sellers—at once authentic and plastic—that
enabled Ailey to hear the particularity of his
origins while also imagining Black dance with
a universal outlook.
OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 39
 Lowell George
in Eight and a Half Songs
1 . “ E ASY T O S L I P ”
L
ike many people who prove indel-
ible, Lowell George was a miasma
of contradictions. He was a Holly-
wood kid best known for playing
an idiosyncratic brand of Southern
music that was foremostly appreciated in
the Mid-Atlantic and Europe. He was an in-
40 WINTER 2021
BY ELIZABETH NELSON
tellectual and a pioneering slide guitarist
who trafficked in silly songs about fat men
in bathtubs and hamburgers at midnight.
He was a short and sometimes concerningly
overweight individual who was utterly, even
diabolically, irresistible to women. He was
the best boyfriend, because he was encour-
aging, uncondescending, and solicitous of
women’s talent in a manner uncommon to his
time. He was the worst boyfriend, because he
was married. Many musicians and producers
who worked with him found the experience
life-affirming and beatific, but his own band
Little Feat was a nonstop apocalypse of roil-
ing tensions. He was a sideman to the wildly
divergent artists Frank Zappa, John Cale,
Rickie Lee Jones, and Robert Palmer, and
in every case it made total sense. Lowell’s
Yellow Guitar, 2021, by Edgar Bryan. Courtesy the artist
talents were limitless and his tastes aggres-
sively catholic. Like a method actor, he had
an eerie way of fully transforming himself
into whatever a project required. Chamber
music, blue-eyed soul, and avant-blues all
came to him without inhibition. His best-
known song is 1971’s doleful trucker ballad
“Willin’,” whose formula of “weed, whites,
and wine” has proved a time-tested recipe
for transcending adversity; the song has been
covered by everyone from Bob Dylan to Man-
dy Moore. He was a man of heroic appetites,
and they say time loves a hero. Well, maybe
it does and maybe it doesn’t. “Easy to Slip,”
the first song on Little Feat’s second album,
Sailin’ Shoes, is nothing less than a how-to
for a new kind of swaggering, revolutionary
roots music. It’s three minutes and twenty
seconds of Booker T.–groove, Merle-esque
twang, and a melody that might elicit
a raised eyebrow from Paul McCartney
himself. It’s the sound of someone who
loves country, soul, pop, and confes-
sional folk music so much that he can’t
go three minutes without playing them
all at once. That it is not at least as well
known as your average Eagles hit is
objectively weird, but this is something
we should register about Lowell George
and Little Feat: weirdness is the default
setting. Glaring oversights. Accidents of
history. Hits that should have been. Hits
that will never be.
To be fair, for all its ingratiating
hooks, “Easy to Slip” vibrates on a much
stranger frequency than the Eagles ever
did. It’s a song about appetites, and
giving in to them, but it betrays no
particular opinion about this. It is not
leering and lusty, but neither is it scolding
or cautionary. If anything it’s dreamy.
It’s so easy to slip
It’s so easy to fall
And let your memory drift
And do nothing at all
Our vices, it seems to say, pull us like the
moon pulls the tide. You give in to them fi-
nally not because you want to, or don’t want
to, but because your vices are who you are.
This is sad, yes, because your vices will even-
tually kill you, probably sooner than later.
On the other hand, it’s not so bad, because
you will have lived as Lowell George seems
to have believed was appropriate: viscerally,
manically, swallowing whatever is the hu-
man equivalent of the forty million krill the
Listen to an accompanying playlist
by Elizabeth Nelson while you read.
average blue whale ingests on a daily basis.
Lowell George was a whale of a man.
2 . “ H U N G A R I A N R H A P S O DY ”
H is odd life and ambivalent relationship to
fame come with a suitably offbeat origin
story. At the height of the studio system in
Hollywood during the 1920s through the
1940s, his father, Willard Hampton George,
was known as the “furrier to the stars,” which
is exactly what it sounds like; if a motion
picture required its cast to be clad in fur, Wil-
lard Hampton was your man and his Wilshire
Boulevard shop was your destination. This
connection provided a surprising level of
entrée into Hollywood social circles. The
senior George outfitted Rita Hayworth and
Greta Garbo, hunted with W. C. Fields, and
Maybe the only thing
about Lowell George
that seemingly
everyone agrees on
is that he really did
have very small and
very unusual feet.
built a home directly across the road from
Errol Flynn. He was widely known as “the
chinchilla industry’s greatest friend,” a turn
of phrase which rhymes with the explicit
absurdity of Lowell’s own sensibilities.
Housebound by asthma, Lowell began
taking music lessons at age five and almost
immediately demonstrated remarkable apti-
tude. Within a couple years he was perform-
ing Franz Liszt’s “Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2”
on harmonica on the televised talent compe-
tition Ted Mack’s Original Amateur Hour, a
forerunner to Star Search and American Idol.
Much of this is lost to history. Some say he
won, or at least they heard him say he won.
Other accounts claim that a teenage Frank
Zappa was one of his fellow competitors and
that both were bested by a tap dancer. None
of this is verifiable. There is plenty of Original
Scan the code within the Spotify app or visit Oxford
American Magazine on Spotify to stream the playlist.
Amateur Hour footage available online, but
apparently none of this historic night. Which
is a shame because—“Hungarian Rhapsody”
on harmonica? How even? Why even? Like so
many Lowell anecdotes it explains everything
and nothing.
Over the next several years he would
master the sitar, piano, and flute. As a high
schooler he favored jazz stalwarts Herbie
Mann and Rahsaan Roland Kirk but soon
enough caught the Byrds live and the rock
& roll bug in the process. After graduation
he formed a loud, art-damaged outfit called
the Factory, which included future Little
Feat drummer Richie Hayward. The Factory
achieved only modest success but, in keep-
ing with the surreal nature of their time and
place, marked appearances on the sitcoms
F Troop and Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C. playing
fictional versions of themselves. Many
musicians spend years attempting to
land the kind of exposure a national
television appearance can mean for
their careers. In Lowell George’s life, it
was the sort of thing that just happened.
3 . “ D I R T Y WAT E R ”
F inding a standing gig in the late
’60s was freighted with an urgency
that superseded standard ambitions.
An unemployed musician was a prime
target for being drafted into the war
in Vietnam.
“Everybody was terrified,” guitarist
Fred Tackett recalls. “You’re just start-
ing to build your career and all of the
sudden you’re facing a three-year inter-
ruption or even death.” The Little Rock,
Arkansas–born Tackett was a recent arrival
in L.A., having been recruited into Jimmy
Webb’s band. Webb had just scored huge hits
as a songwriter with “By the Time I Get to
Phoenix”(for Glen Campbell) and “Up, Up
and Away” (for the 5th Dimension) and used
his earnings to rent a twelve-room mansion
where official residency was informal and the
party never stopped. That’s where Tackett,
who would contribute many songs to Little
Feat and eventually replace Lowell George
in a re-formed lineup, first encountered him.
“It was a weird mix,” he recalls over the
phone. “You would wake up and Jimi Hendrix
would be crashed out on the couch and Peter
Tork would be barbecuing. The first time I
saw Lowell he was sitting on the floor in a
white suit playing sitar, and I asked him if
he was interested in playing any psychedelic
OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 41
music. He told me no, he was exclusively interested in playing
Indian music. Three weeks later he was in the Standells.”
Of his many awkward couplings, George’s abbreviated stint
in 1968 as frontman for the long-running LA-based garage
titans has a persuasive claim to be his strangest. How it is that
the Standells came to briefly replace their departed drummer
and singer Dick Dodd with an obscure multi-instrumentalist
with a preference for jazz is one of those threads that you can Ode to Coca-Cola, Helium, Carbon
pull on for hours without ever fully unraveling it. The band’s
signature song was and is the mighty “Dirty Water,” a 1965 BY CAL FREEMAN
proto-punk love letter to the muddy banks of the Charles River,
some 2,600 miles from Hollywood, the song that blasts from A half-drunk bottle of Coca-Cola
the speakers of Fenway Park every time the Red Sox record the rests on Johnny McGlynn’s tombstone.
final out in a victory. Which is in itself confusing, promoting as A couple of helium balloons are tied to it too.
it does the fully rational idea that any band singing “Boston, Sarah wonders what the story is.
you’re my home” with that much conviction must have at least Neither of us knew Johnny McGlynn,
some formal or informal connection to the city. They didn’t. brand-loyal McGlynn, lover of soda pop
None of them had ever even been there when they tracked it. McGlynn. He’s neighbors
The Standells retained two original members from their with my father now. My father’s his new neighbor.
initial founding in 1962, which did not prevent George from Sarah left wire flowers in the brass stand
immediately appointing himself the band’s leader. He had next to my father’s name on the black
ideas for freshening up the act. He thought they should do a columbarium wall across the little road
throwback gimmick where they all dressed as greasers. He also from McGlynn’s tombstone.
added a new part to their set where he would sit on a carpet My mother, Peggy O’Neill, picked this spot,
onstage and play solo sitar, so there was at least some truth to called “companionship grove,”
what he told Fred Tackett the first time they met. George’s stint for its proximity to the river.
with the Standells lasted a few months. He made five hundred Johnny McGlynn’s Coca-Cola bottle
dollars a week for his trouble. He wasn’t drafted into the army. puts me in mind of that famous jar
But shortly after, he was drafted into the Mothers of Invention. in Tennessee, the way it bends
the Huron River and Huron River
4 . “ M Y G U I TA R WA N T S Drive to the cemetery’s will.
T O K I L L YO U R M A M A” Hot Coca-Cola is disgusting
to consider on this muggy day.

B y 1968 Frank Zappa was a well-established eminence of the

L.A. scene, having garnered a large and loyal following for
his series of escalatingly bizarre satiric art rock–fusion albums
backed by the ever-evolving collective the Mothers of Inven-
tion. A central irony of Zappa’s career is that a figure such as
he—aggressively unglamorous and anticommercial to the point
of belligerence—could only ever have gained traction in the
music industry during the 1960s, when money flowed like water
and an unusual number of industry executives fully tolerated
the notion that eccentrics of every stripe could and should be
nourished and promoted alongside teen pop stars and proven
hitmakers. And yet Zappa hated the Sixties, or seemed to. The
licentiousness, the self-congratulatory utopianism, the co-opting
of counterculture messaging for the purposes of selling shiny
objects—all of it struck him as more than worthy of the scorn
and ridicule he would gleefully heap upon it. Zappa was a lot.
And he was always on the lookout for young and local talent.
Zappa had been a skeptical benefactor of sorts for George’s
early band the Factory—skeptical was typically as far as Zappa
would go—producing some tracks and imprinting upon young
Lowell a sense of controlled anarchy that would inform the
remainder of his career. And so it was not entirely surprising
that he would recruit George to play guitar in the Mothers in
1968, after the Standells misadventure had run its course. It was
a good opportunity but not a very good experience.
It’s supposed to storm later.
My mother worries about the flowers
in the rain and wind. I recite
“The Beautiful American Word,
Sure” by Delmore Schwartz
to the black marble box, but the town
of Flat Rock is stone-deaf to poetry.
You can’t get the words to make music.
I’m not finishing poems much these days.
I keep name-checking my father’s
favorite poets, though, instead
of saying what I don’t know how to say
about finitude and grief. Death is heavy
like the tombstone of Johnny McGlynn.
It bends the space around it to accelerate
the light, but grief is more
like the helium balloons that pretend
to lift his grave; they work at it all day,
this futile lifting.

42 WINTER 2021

Sarah notes how strange it is to see
my mother’s name beneath my father’s
even though her death date’s unfulfilled—
open paren, closed paren, open paren,
parents, parent. There’s so much
I don’t want to tell you. There’s even more
I don’t want to hear myself say, like
I’m equal to the task of leaving
crass symbols with the dead.
The story of Coca-Cola is well-known
and engaging for cocaine’s
appearance as a character, but it’s nothing
when contrasted with the story of helium,
that yellow spectral line observed
during a solar eclipse in 1868,
first among the earthly noble gases,
second among elements in ubiquity.
Carbon, which mycelium borrows
from tree roots to break down matter,
is fourth in abundance; the carbon cycle’s
why there’s little left of your neighbor,
Johnny McGlynn, Father.
But they treated you to fire
and put you in a box which I placed
inside the columbarium wall.
I think you’d like hearing they treated you to fire
from inside your marble; it reminds me
of Milton’s burning marl.
I look at the carbonated beverage
flat in Flat Rock and remember how
I placed a box in a vault
and it made phosphorous run to the river,
and algae stopped the running river, Father.
You watch now like a heron from your
gabbled roost. Johnny McGlynn
sucks ice in 4/4 time. My mother
thinks you deserve a swifter river.
This one’s gold-green like a pile
of newly minted bills or St. Patrick’s Day
swag scattered in a parking lot.
Pretend luck starved of oxygen,
this way we speak of graves
and what you would’ve liked.
I spoke on the phone to Ted Templeman, the storied producer
who helmed two Little Feat LPs, as well as countless classics by
Van Morrison, the Doobie Brothers, and Van Halen. Templeman
and Lowell George became particularly close, speaking almost
nightly in the years before Lowell’s death in 1979, about politics,
martial arts, and the important things in life. Templeman told
me that he thinks Zappa was a bad influence on Lowell.
“A lot of guys were kind of damaged by Frank Zappa in some
way or another,” he said. “He had a way of making people feel
insecure.”
And this is something else that we should register about
Lowell George: For all his swaggering bravado, he didn’t require
any assistance in feeling vulnerable.
In some ways Zappa and George were very similar. Both had
obsessive work ethics and autocratic tendencies, not to mention
a willingness to hurt feelings to achieve their aims. In other ways
they couldn’t be more different. Zappa held the use of drugs in
contempt, while George held it close to his heart. It was a brief
meeting of the dangerous minds, but crucial in some sense to
understanding why Little Feat never quite stepped right.
The best song they tracked together is “My Guitar Wants to
Kill Your Mama” from the 1970 Zappa release Weasels Ripped
My Flesh. Its legitimate dirty groove (think everything on a
spectrum of ZZ Top to Curtis Mayfield) is a prelude to stranger
things. The lead guitar turns homicidal. The horn section trans-
forms into a harmonica and then a marching band and then
a Spanish guitar. Imagine the Doors if they had ever become
legitimately frightening. Little Feat in gestation.
5. “44 BLUES /
H OW M A N Y M O R E Y E A R S ”
O ne thing—maybe the only thing—about Lowell George
that seemingly everyone agrees on is that he really did
have very small and very unusual feet. Sized eight-and-a-half
and reputedly as wide as they were long, they seemed to have
attracted the attention of everyone he encountered. Some say
it was Mothers of Invention drummer Jimmy Carl Black who
inspired the eventual name Little Feat with an offhand remark
during a rehearsal; others credit Lowell’s weed dealer Leslie
Krasnow. Anyway, the moniker was a fait accompli and in some
ways an omen. For all of their massive ability, Little Feat always
felt circumscribed by intrinsic limitations.
The initial lineup was a murderers’ row of stunning musical
talent and potentially legitimate murderers. Keyboardist Bill
Payne, drummer Richie Hayward, and bassist Roy Estrada filled
out a brilliant foursome that tended toward running-in-the-red
frustration. Hayward and George had both been members of
the Factory and the Mothers, and their relationship was tumul-
tuous on a good day. Both were hard-headed. They were also
brothers-in-law, married at one time to the sisters Patte and
Pam Price, part of an incestuous overlap within the band, like
an under-the-radar Fleetwood Mac. They fought relentlessly,
and often violently, for years. Billy Payne was no shrinking
violet himself. Roy Estrada is currently serving a life sentence
in Texas for felony child abuse. It was sort of a fucked-up scene.
George seemed to have taken to heart Zappa’s control-freak
tendencies, and the rendering of their self-titled debut quickly
OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 43
devolved into a fraught showdown with
producer and friend Russ Titelman over
everything from creative direction to pub-
lishing rights. The sessions would engender
a permanent rift. At some point during the
recording, George sliced off a chunk of his
left palm in an accident with, of all things,
a model airplane. Ry Cooder agreed to fill
in on guitar, playing slide on several tracks
before George’s ego could no longer stand
it. While tracking the tune “44 Blues / How
Many More Years,” he grabbed his guitar
and engaged Cooder in a legendary duel
which promptly reduced his injured hand
to a bloody pulp. It’s some of the best music
on the record.
In spite of—or because of—the perilous en-
vironment, Little Feat is a landmark roots LP,
slotting comfortably alongside the Stones’
Sticky Fingers and Rod Stewart’s Every Pic-
ture Tells a Story from the same year, all
three of them records that alchemize coun-
try, soul, and blues into a vernacular which
paradoxically feels both novel and timeless.
Strong reviews and no shortage of ace mate-
rial notwithstanding—including the winsome
character study “Truck Stop Girl,” the stoner-
boogie anthem “Hamburger Midnight,” and
the first appearance of “Willin’”—Little Feat
sold abysmally and Warner Bros. waffled on
greenlighting a second release.
6 . “ T WO T R A I N S ”
B y the time the band was recording their
third LP, a refurbished Little Feat had re-
placed Estrada on bass with Kenny Gradney
and added second guitarist Paul Barrere and
percussionist Sam Clayton. The new band
would be slower, funkier, and New Orleans–
focused. The 1973 release Dixie Chicken
found George in the producer’s chair and
credibly recast the group as competitors to
the Meters, Booker T. and the MG’s, and the
Band as the best pure groove outfit of their
era. Sam Clayton, who is the brother of famed
soul singer Merry Clayton and had previously
been playing with Delaney & Bonnie, knew
almost nothing of Little Feat’s music when
he was first asked to join. But he did quickly
take notice of George’s feet. “They were like
little pads!” he told me.
The addition of Clayton on congas was
another unsubtle salvo in the on-again,
off-again contretemps between Lowell and
Richie Hayward, whose dynamic playing
could turn to mayhem at a moment’s notice.
Clayton recalls George telling him, “Just keep
44 WINTER 2021
the beat, control the rhythm. You have to
hold Richie down.”
Hayward was unsurprisingly chagrined
with both the assessment of his playing and
the addition of his new rhythmic minder, but
the results were unquestionably successful.
Tracks like the sultry “Walkin’ All Night”
and the exuberant “Two Trains” marinate
in a newly discovered sense of space while
George’s vocals are a more than credible
pastiche of his obvious model Dr. John. A
year after Creedence Clearwater Revival cul-
minated their breathtaking run with the LP
Mardi Gras, here came another group of Cali-
fornians paying loving homage to the bayou.
“Two Trains,” in particular, is a beacon
of borderline unseemly Dionysian groove, a
song that Lowell liked so well he’d re-record
it for his solo debut, Thanks, I’ll Eat It Here. A
traditional second-line New Orleans rhythm
and whooping backing vocals (including
Bonnie Raitt) set to a gnomic narrative about
love, betrayal, and a couple of trains that
either are or are not going the right direc-
tion, and anyway, how would you know the
difference?
Illusion it is just the same conclusion
I don’t know how to play the game
Of what it is or how it’s going to be
When one train is my friend and the
other train is me
So thorough was Little Feat’s mastery of
the New Orleans sound that many newcomers
to the group concluded they were a Southern
soul band. The music business was still a re-
gional enterprise, and what you heard on the
radio was often all you knew about a new act.
In Atlanta and DC and Baltimore, they sure
sounded the part. In Los Angeles, escaping
who you were by pretending to be something
else was the local business. Illusion it is just
the same conclusion. America was a more
permeable place then. The Standells repre-
sented Boston, and Little Feat was a plausible
Delta commodity. The person you were born
didn’t circumscribe who you might become.
What was Lowell’s attraction to the music of
the Delta and why precisely was he so adroit
at it? If his strangeness has any overarching
principle or governing strategy, it’s to do
with his uncanny ability to inhabit motifs
and cultures that exist outside his experience.
Clearly Lowell was a fan of the Crescent City
and its hammerlock groove as evidenced
by a cover of Allen Toussaint’s brilliant “On
Your Way Down” on Dixie Chicken. But a
passing fascination is not the same as a full-
born inheritance. Lowell lost himself in these
roles: the Dr. John–prescribed Delta blues
raconteur or the truck-driving Olympian of
“Willin’.” There is something inspiring about
this devotion but also something fraught.
When Little Feat fans heard “On Your Way
Down,” they didn’t think of Allen Toussaint.
They thought of Hollywood’s very own Low-
ell George.
In 1972, Lowell first met up with Raitt, who
was at the time a fledgling singer-songwriter
and fellow slide guitarist on the L.A. scene.
The attraction was powerful and mutual.
Per Ben Fong-Torres’s excellent 2013 band
history, Willin’, Raitt describes the dynamic
this way: “He was really a fox. I mean, he was
one of the most attractive men I’ve ever seen.
I mean, I fell hard for him. He neglected to
mention that he had a family.” When she
found this out, they broke up, as you would
expect. Yet the two remained friends and
collaborators, and Raitt remained a feature
part of the so-called Little Feat Auxiliary of
fellow musicians who would abet the group
on records and on stage.
Linda Ronstadt—Linda Ronstadt!—relays
a similar story about spending the night with
George only to be awoken by his pregnant
wife, Liz, whom he had also neglected to dis-
cuss prior to that morning. Per Fong-Torres,
Ronstadt described the encounter: “And I
said, ‘Well, come in.’ I felt some solidarity
with her at that point—you just do… So she
came into my room, and he woke up and said
‘Hi Liz, where’s the coffee?’ He didn’t know
where he was. And I realized he had been
lying to me and lying to her, so the two of
us are standing there like ‘Hmmmm! What’s
your story here, boy?’ Anyway, that was the
end of that.”
“He was like a big sheepdog that’s always
wandering into the wrong places,” Temple-
man buoyantly reflects. Ronstadt too re-
mained a friend and admirer. Even when his
behavior was bad, something about George
remained ingratiating. Who gets mad at a
sheepdog? Who gets mad at a whale?
7 . “ O H , AT L A N TA”
F inally, after five frequently volatile
and quixotic years, 1974’s Feats Don’t
Fail Me Now provided a breakthrough of
sorts. Recorded in Maryland with George
again producing with an assist from old pal
Van Dyke Parks, the record doubled-down
on their newfound groove and rode its
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good-time atmosphere to a more than re-
spectable two-hundred-thousand sales. A
triumphal tour of Europe followed, where
the band was greeted as conquering heroes
and routinely wiped the stage with ostensible
headliners the Doobie Brothers.
Besides proving genuinely popular, Feats
Don’t Fail Me Now departed from previous
Little Feat records in an even more crucial
way. For the first time, the best songs on the
album were not written by Lowell. With its
heedlessly insinuating opening piano riff
and unvarnished tales of all the things the
road can provide in terms of good lovin’,
Billy Payne’s “Oh, Atlanta” conjures Lowell’s
gentleman-rogue degeneracy and recasts it
in a Southern-fried Sodom. In an interview
provided to the storied journalist Bill Flana-
gan ten days before George’s death, George
expresses his admiration for his by-then es-
tranged bandmate’s song: “I had been saying:
‘Bill, these songs you’re writing suck.’ I was
real blunt with him. And right after that he
came up with ‘Oh, Atlanta,’ which I think is
a very successful song. But boy, that was the
beginning of the end right there.”
In an acknowledgment that George’s con-
temporaneous state of mind was too scat-
tered for multitasking, 1977’s Time Loves a
Hero restored Ted Templeman to the pro-
ducer’s chair. Templeman was happy to be
back but quickly discovered he was recording
a very different band than the one he had
made Sailin’ Shoes with five years previous.
For one thing, George, very much a lover of
the recording studio, was often nowhere to
be found. Your vices pull you like the moon
pulls the tide.
“I couldn’t get him to come down to the
studio,” Templeman recalls. “We were track-
ing a song of his called ‘Rocket in My Pocket’
and it needed slide guitar. And he didn’t
want to get out of bed! So I had Bonnie Raitt
come down and play it. He was so furious.
He showed up in his pajamas.”
Of the nine songs that make up Time Loves
a Hero, George has one full writing credit
and one co-write. The vast majority of the
material was composed by Bill Payne and
Paul Barrere, including the more than six-
minute-long light-jazz instrumental “Dog
Day at the Races,” which George hated so
much he would leave the stage rather than
perform it. Your enjoyment of Weather Re-
port–inspired fusion may determine your
patience with it, but regardless we were now
a long way off from “Truck Stop Girl.”
46 WINTER 2021
8 . “ S PA N I S H M O O N ”
L owell’s health, never sterling to begin with,
was in steep decline. During the produc-
tion of 1975’s The Last Record Album he was
diagnosed with hepatitis C, which in conjunc-
tion with severe sinus issues placed consider-
able strain on his immune system. He suffered
a motorcycle accident while horsing around
on a Yamaha, rupturing several vertebrae,
two of which eventually had to be removed.
Nevertheless, his zeal for music remained
undiminished. He was recruited to produce
the Grateful Dead’s Shakedown Street, with
predictably debauched, scattered, and inter-
mittently thrilling results. He met, actively
promoted, and commenced an affair with
Rickie Lee Jones, failing once again to men-
tion his marriage but kick-starting her career
in the process.
The final hurrah for Lowell and Little Feat
was in some ways the perfect valediction for
a band that never made much conventional
sense and always came with an expiration
date. Recorded over several appearances in
their strongholds of London and Washington,
D.C., 1978’s Waiting for Columbus is an epic
two-LP live set that captures the group at the
peak of their razor’s-edge intensity—the bas-
tard child of the Grateful Dead’s Cornell ’77
and the Who’s Live at Leeds. Appropriately
enough, the actual concerts were character-
ized by overflowing hostility between mem-
bers, including one moment when George
either punched or karate-chopped Hayward
backstage.
It took countless L.A. studio overdubs,
edits, and other sleights of hand, but the
finished product astonished even the war-
ring members. Lowell sings and plays like his
vintage self and the Tower of Power horns
supply impeccable backing as Little Feat
cooks, one final time. Waiting for Columbus
regularly ranks highly in polls of the greatest
live documents of all time. But it was the end.
As he sings on the mesmerizing, slow-burning
“Spanish Moon”: “Whiskey and bad cocaine
/ Poison get you just the same.”
His delivery is neither lustful or scold-
ing. But this time it’s not dreamy either. His
delivery is tired.
8 . 5 . “ B E O N E N OW ”
I t is difficult to understand how people
close to George did not perceive how per-
ilously near the edge he was, but even in
death George is a hard person to get a handle
on. He was 5'8" and at least 250 pounds. He
used cocaine and alcohol with the abandon
of one who’s afraid they might cease to ex-
ist. Certainly some friends knew he was in
trouble. Ted Templeman remembers, “I knew
what he was doing. He’d be out on the road
and partying too hard.” And yet, everyone
remarks on George’s feats of strength, his
high jumps on stage, his ability to lift and
carry anything, his fabled expertise in martial
arts, and his frenetic, kinetic energy. He must
have seemed unkillable.
In the forty-two years since his demise in
a northern Virginia hotel under seedy and
semi-mysterious circumstances at the age of
thirty-four, George’s legend has waxed and
waned. For those who knew him, the intensity
of their emotion around him remains pal-
pable. And yet Little Feat, never huge stars
during George’s life, remain mostly a niche
concern in his death. Amid the sad parade of
rock casualties, Lowell George might be the
most gifted of the bunch not to be constantly
recycled by nostalgia-driven periodicals and
classic rock radio.
When it became clear that Lowell had
not exactly been meticulous in his estate
planning, Billy Payne quickly organized a
tribute concert with the proceeds going to
his wife and three children from three differ-
ent mothers. All of the latter-day Little Feat
lineup participated, save for Richie Hayward,
who was in the hospital following his own
motorcycle accident. The cream of the Los
Angeles music scene chipped in, as did the
Feats Auxiliary: Bonnie Raitt, Emmylou Har-
ris, Jackson Browne, all of them intimates of
varying sorts to this strange, anxious, and
gregarious man.
Fred Tackett remembers doing overdubs
on the final Little Feat LP Down on the
Farm—the posthumous album tracked in
part after Lowell’s death. “We were right in
the middle of recording when he died. I had
a song called ‘Be One Now’ on it and had to
go in and finish my parts. So David Lindley
and I were listening to the tracks Lowell
recorded before he passed away. They were
ideas for parts he was going to play later.
It was the thing that was the most horrible
and uncomfortable. It was heartbreaking.”
Ted Templeman tells me before signing
off: “I’m just glad we got to talk about all
this stuff. Nobody else I know would be in-
terested.” All the people that we miss, do
they really exist at all?

I
n Montana, the sky seems endless. From
the passenger seat of the white Toyota
Tundra my dad has rented for our five-
day trip here in the state, I keep pok-
ing my head out of the window like an
48 WINTER 2021
In Montana
BY JESSICA LYNNE
overzealous puppy, marveling at the infinite
blue as we drive away from the sleepy Billings
airport. My dad has driven a truck my entire
life and riding with him in one usually means
there is business to attend to.
In 2018, we flew into Billings the last week
of June for something akin to a father-
daughter trip. My dad first suggested
the trip in January, to commemorate the
fortieth anniversary of his graduation from
Polaroid photos courtesy the author
C. M. Russell High School in Great Falls.
His job as an elementary school principal
prevented him from attending the reunion,
so I know this trip is his way of honoring
the young person he was and, perhaps, the
person he is still working to be. It had been
almost thirty years since either one of us last
visited the state. My dad, the history buff,
suggested the trip with a desire to see some
of the state’s parks and historic landmarks.
I am the only one to receive an invitation to
accompany him because, like my father, I
am interested in history though not to the
same degree. His invitation was a parental
vote of confidence: I would appreciate our
encounters; I would not feign enthusiasm.
Montana, in a time before me, had been
a home of great significance to my family.
They’ve long since moved back South, so I
want to experience as an adult the allure of
this place that seemed a utopia to my
relatives. Of my dad’s three kids, I am
the only one with even the slightest
relationship to Montana. In an old fam-
ily photograph, my parents—young,
almost cool, and still very much in
love—are standing together on a pier,
lakeside in front of a mountain. My
mother wears a red-and-white-striped
long-sleeved shirt and is holding my
infant self as both she and my father
smile for the camera. The year is 1990
and my parents have traveled to Great
Falls from Hampton, Virginia, to visit
my paternal grandparents. I have not
physically seen this photograph in
many years, but the image is etched in
my mind, and it is the first thing I think
about as I say yes to my dad and this trip.
My father and I still do not share much by
way of musical tastes, so our radio choices
are a random assortment of NPR, (terrible)
smooth jazz, and sports talk, but in the days
leading up to the trip I create for myself a
playlist of familiar songs that comfort me
to carry me through this adventure. Mavis
Staples is the first person I add to the list
along with Roberta Flack and Stevie Wonder.
I include a few gospel favorites from Maha-
lia Jackson and covers sung by Fannie Lou
Hamer because they are steady and true, and
their voices remind me of the many elders
in my life. I include Alice Coltrane, the sage,
and Sister Rosetta Tharpe, the maverick,
and I even add to the list the big band leader
Lionel Hampton. In my preparation, I learn
that Hampton once frequented the Ozark
Club, a popular Black jazz venue in Great
Listen to "In Montana," an accompanying playlist
by Jessica Lynne, while you read.
Falls, and I would like to feel closer to the
city in this cliched way. I include some Earth,
Wind & Fire because these guys are my dad’s
favorites and my earliest memories of listen-
ing to music in my household can be summed
up like this: gospel and Earth, Wind & Fire.
I don’t ever expect to listen to this playlist
with my dad in full. Perhaps a song every now
and again. When you are a passenger in his
truck, most sonic choices are his even when
he compromises, hence, terrible smooth jazz.
But I do think this playlist will be my own buoy.
T his sky—Big Sky—looks nothing like the
beachy blues of my Virginia hometown
or the Georgia ceilings of my dad’s early
youth. Both places I know well by sight and
scent and sound. Down South, a hazy blue
sky could precede those stifling summer
storms rolling in along the Chesapeake Bay.
His invitation was
a parental vote of
confidence: I would
appreciate our
encounters; I would
not feign enthusiasm.
In Montana, this hazy blue sky is stunning but
unfamiliar, breathtaking yet full of a mean-
ing just beyond the reaches of my memory.
My paternal family first arrived in Great
Falls, upsouth from Warner Robins, Georgia,
the first week of June in 1977, stationed at the
Malmstrom Air Force Base as my dad was
heading into his junior year of high school.
This new landscape stunned, and a military
assignment became emblematic of greater
economic stability for my working-class fam-
ily. This would be their first of two stints
living in the state. Because the orders that
servicemen receive dictate much of their
military experience, the family returned to
Georgia two years later, but by that time it
was clear to my grandparents that Great Falls
was the city in which they would grow old,
far away from their own siblings and cousins
and parents—a home of their own making.
Scan the code within the Spotify app or visit Oxford
American Magazine on Spotify to stream the playlist.
In the early ’90s, by the time my grandpar-
ents had returned to the state, their grown
children living elsewhere, this dream was
close to realized. But, back in Warner Robins,
my great-great-grandmother, Fannie Griffin,
fell ill and my own grandmother became
her caretaker. Montana became a dream of
the past.
When I was old enough to ask questions
about that photograph of my father, mother,
and me—taken before my grandparents relo-
cated back to Georgia permanently—I asked
my relatives how often they saw other Black
people. Someone would inevitably laugh as if
reliving the inquiry as they had first consid-
ered it themselves decades ago. What I knew
of my world then was that my Southernness
was deeply connected to my Blackness. How
did my family hold on to this way of being in a
place so far away from their Nu-Way hotdogs
or family gravesites or familiar roads?
In photographs of my family’s Mon-
tana, I notice my relatives frequently
captured in scenes around a meal or
as hosts to my father and his siblings’
young friends. Holidays or birthdays
or the meeting of significant others are
all anchored by elaborate dinners—
baked hams and collards and sweet
corn and caramel cakes and home-
made lemonades and iced teas. They
tell a story of deep love and pleasure.
It dawns on me that contained within
these minutiae is the shape of all that
they retained.
My dad tells me as we pull into Bill-
ings’s popular restaurant the Burger
Dive, so much became possible in Mon-
tana. The diner is crowded, and our server
keeps calling my father “sir” and referring
to me as “ma’am” even though I’ve already
told him that isn’t necessary. The third time
around, he laughs nervously as he sets our
plates on the table and promises it won’t
happen again. I look at my dad and ask, well,
how does it feel to be back?
I feel good, but it’s been a long time, he says
to me, and even though Great Falls is still
another three hours and forty-five minutes
away, I hear in his voice a nostalgia that I
recognize from family lore, and I wonder
whether this trip is about tracking time or
trying to go back in time or trying to bend
time in a different direction. The next morn-
ing, I add Otis Redding to my playlist, a fellow
middle-Georgia man I know my father re-
spects, connect my Bluetooth, and we begin
the day with Redding’s baritone.
OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 49
I n the winter months leading up to our trip,
my father gets in touch with a reference
historian at the Montana Historical Society
Research Center to learn the gravesite loca-
tion of Mary Fields. Fields, a Black woman
thought to have been born into slavery in
Tennessee, eventually made her way to
Montana in the late 1880s after joining the
group of nuns charged with running the St.
Peter’s mission in Cascade, Montana. Her
reputation was noteworthy: tough, brash,
no-nonsense yet reliable, hardworking. She
was also a smoker and a drinker and found
comfort in the local saloons much to the
ire of Great Falls’s Jesuit bishop, John Bap-
tist Brondell. The activities were enough to
get Fields banned from the mission in 1894.
However, the next year, Fields took a job as
a Star Route carrier, or an independently
contracted mailperson, delivering mail via
a stagecoach for the United States
Postal Service. She is widely consid-
ered to be the first Black woman to
have held this position. My father reminds me
In response to my father’s inquiry,
the reference historian emails him a again that we can’t
Google link to the location of Mary
Fields’s gravesite in Hillside Cem-
etery in Cascade, Montana; she also
forget to find Mary’s
shares the links to short blog posts
the Research Center had written gravesite. I know we
about other prominent Black Mon-
tanans, including a homesteader are chasing history,
named Annie Morgan and the former
Montana state librarian Alma Smith
Jacobs. Before taking up that post in
personal and otherwise.
1973, Ms. Smith Jacobs served as the
director of the Great Falls Library.
The historian closes her email by thanking
my dad for his interest in history and for his
patience and promises to “compile a packet”
on Montana history that she will mail out
to him. My father forwards me the emails
months before our trip, and I mark them
“important.”
As we hike Pompey’s Pillar on our sec-
ond day, my father reminds me again that
we can’t forget to find Mary’s gravesite. I
know we are chasing history, personal and
otherwise.
B lack folks made their way to the Ameri-
can West in great numbers immediately
following the enactment of the Emancipa-
tion Proclamation and the end of the Civil
War. Referred to as “Exodusters,” these men,
women, and children sought new homes in
states such as Kansas, Oklahoma, and Colo-
50 WINTER 2021
rado to escape the brutality of plantation
life and its afterlives. As Glenda Riley writes
in her essay “American Daughters: Black
Women in the West,” during this period,
“thousands of Southern blacks traveled up
the Missouri River and along other routes in
an attempt to escape the evils of sharecrop-
ping, tenant farming, and antiblack senti-
ment. Seeking a better life in the ‘promised
land,’ they sought employment in cities or on
farms, worked as cowhands, homesteaded,
or created both rural and urban all-black
communities.”
In Montana, the cities of Helena, Bozeman,
and Butte saw their Black populations rise
as Black servicemen, particularly Buffalo
Soldiers during the years of 1888–1898, found
a home in Big Sky Country after concluding
their service. Churches, civic leagues, art
and social clubs, and entertainment venues
became centers of Black community. Great
Falls was no exception. During the late nine-
teenth and early twentieth centuries, Black
life flourished within institutions such as
Union Bethel AME Church—founded circa
1883 by the city’s first Black residents—and
the legendary Ozark Club owned and oper-
ated by former boxer Leo LaMar, who had
migrated to Montana from Chicago.
A first iteration of the Ozark thrived in
the early 1900s as an all-Black, membership-
driven social club. A young LaMar would
even train for matches there before the club
closed in 1922, a casualty of the Prohibition
era. A decade later, Montana was “wet” again,
as historian Ken Robison notes, and LaMar,
who had hung up his boxing gloves, revived
the Ozark as a “‘colored’ members-only club.”
Wartime efforts continued to bring steady
waves of Black families to the area as the last
century rolled on. This new Ozark quickly
became the jazz joint to welcome musicians,
comedians, and dancers such as Beulah Bry-
ant, pianist Oscar Dennard, and a young
Redd Foxx.
The Ozark was a major stop for musicians
touring west from cities like Detroit, Chicago,
and Minneapolis or athletes in town com-
peting or conducting visits at the military
bases. “When Joe Louis toured the air bases
in 1945, he was ‘wined and dined’ by military
leaders during the daytime,” Robison writes
in his article “Breaking Barriers: Everyone’s
Welcome at the Ozark Club,” “but he spent
his evenings at the Ozark Club.” The same
went for prominent figures such as the Har-
lem Globetrotters or big band leaders like
Lionel Hampton. Because I learn that Dinah
Washington (a former vocalist for Hampton’s
band) also sang at the club, I add “This Bit-
ter Earth” to my playlist, a song I
took great care to memorize after
hearing it in Charles Burnett’s film
Killer of Sheep. Washington and the
song’s writer and producer, Clyde
Otis, were both Southerners, too.
None of this was information I
knew before we began our trek,
but I started to compile a folder of
small articles, Google search returns,
and factoids for myself. It isn’t that
I considered such history one that
immediately belonged to me, in the
way that we all assign narratives as
ours. But these early Black Montana
communities cultivated the social
infrastructure necessary for my fam-
ily to feel at ease thousands of miles
away from their first home. Learning about
them helped me understand what history had
made possible a softer landing for my people.
C. M. Russell High School is relatively emp-
ty when my dad and I enter the lobby.
It is our first stop in Great Falls, and I have
heard many stories about this place where
my dad and my late uncle became athletic
phenoms. I watch my dad navigate his way,
by memory, to the high school gym he had
not stepped foot into in four decades. I listen
to him talk about the guidance counselor
who convinced him to take the ACT and
subsequently drove him to the test site days
later in the nearby city of Havre. We walk
past lockers and trophy cases and banners
oozing school spirit.
My dad was a baseball star. Humble, he
rarely talks about his playing days now, but
 memories.

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as part of the Great Falls American Legion
team, folks would line up to see him play,
my grandmother says fondly whenever she
reminisces. I believe this to be true, even
though I know time has a way of leading to
embellished memory. C. M. Russell didn’t
have a varsity baseball team, and so, as my
dad and I walk toward the back of the gym
near the coaches’ offices, he makes sure to
note this as the reason I won’t find his high
school photo on the wall. There is, however,
a photo of my uncle Tony, a 1979 first team
all-conference and all-state cornerback who
is forever enshrined as one of C. M. Russell’s
football greats. I had never seen this photo
of my uncle, who wore the number 22 as a
player in high school. My dad and I stare
at the wall in silence for a minute or two
as if speaking might open a floodgate for
which neither one of us is prepared. I step
back behind my dad to give him space as
this moment between him and the memory
of his little brother is extended. Let’s see if
anyone is inside the office, he says to me
after this pause.
No one is inside the office. Instead, what we
find is an obituary for my late uncle pinned
to a corkboard. I realize then that it is almost
ten years to the day since my uncle died,
and I have to stop myself from snatching the
obituary from the wall. I had not been able
52 WINTER 2021
to attend his funeral, and this still feels as
though I have committed a terrible offense.
In the years since my uncle’s passing, my dad
would occasionally ask me to try and source
old newspaper clippings from the local pa-
pers in Great Falls that featured highlights of
his brother’s glory days. Instead, a distraction
would always emerge and I would inevitably
forget his request.
I try very hard to remember the last time
I saw my uncle alive, but I cannot recall the
memory.
C ertain facts from my Montana folder stand
out to me. Like how in the 1980 census,
one year after my family left Montana for the
first time, of the 786,690 documented resi-
dents, only 1,738 identified as Black or African
American. Or how the land now occupied was
first stewarded by Blackfoot, Crow, and Metis
Indians as Black homesteaders continued to
migrate north and west to a kind of safety.
Did you ever hear back from the research
historian?, I ask my dad as we pull off from
our hotel in search of Mary Fields. He had
forgotten to share the materials with me.
The closer we get to the cemetery the more
arid and windy the roads become, and I am
curious how many people pass this way daily.
Cascade, the town in which the cemetery is
located, is home to 684 people; the city’s
official website encourages new residents to
download a welcome packet to get to know
the town better.
We don’t find the cemetery immediately,
missing our right turn on St. Peter’s Mission
Road before re-routing ourselves. We park
the truck and eagerly begin to look for Mary.
The sky appears so close to us today; I swear
that if I wanted to touch it, I could, as if the
spirit is extending to me an invitation to step
into a liminal elsewhere. I wonder, then, if
this is Mary’s sky.
Her grave plot is well manicured and well
attended to: fresh flowers have recently been
placed there, and I think about the profun-
dity of a Black woman, born into slavery,
whose wayfinding efforts remain enough of
a marvel that I find myself standing at her
graveside more than a century later.
I took photographs of everything while in
Montana: the Missouri River as it flowed
through Giant Springs State Park; the two
horses I greeted while looking for Mary
Fields’s grave; the American Legion baseball
stadium where my dad played centerfield
as a teen; the Taco Treat restaurant where
my dad and his friends would hang out;
the Little Bighorn Memorial; and the sky—
blues and clouds and sun that kept my eyes
wide open.
54 WINTER 2021 Fuzzface, 2019, by Omar Velázquez. Courtesy the artist and Corbett vs. Dempsey, Chicago
 Buddy Guy
Walks into a Bar
It’s Chicago. It’s the Nineties. It’s winter. The
young man has come north to further his
education, and he’s remained on track for a
few months, but then he’s derailed: by youth,
by fear, by appetites, by a relationship, by a
breakup. One cold night he sets off wandering
through the city and gets only ten blocks or
so before he reconsiders. He needs to find a
place, a coffee shop, a bookstore, a bar. He
goes by the open door of a club. He can see
and hear inside, where there’s a man play-
ing, an electric guitar being played. Notes
come flashing off the thing. For a second,
maybe even less, his life is repaired. The
club door shuts. He ends up in a bar down
the street, listening to a man in a hat hold
forth on the toxicity of nostalgia. “Memory
is a thicket in which you imagine you are
happy to be trapped,” says the man in a
hat. The young man tries to remember the
music the man in the club was playing but
cannot. It’s his loss.
B
uddy Guy, born George Guy in
1936, in Lettsworth, Louisiana, a
tiny town at the crook of the L of
the state, just off the encroaching
nose of Mississippi. Buddy Guy,
born poor to parents who picked cotton for
$2.50 per hundred pounds. As a small child,
he was enlisted to pick alongside them. For
six, ten, twelve years, when you weigh even
less than that, how do you puzzle through
the process of calculating your own value?
Over the years—in his memoir, When I Left
Home, in interviews—Guy has slipped this
question, asks that he be considered not
from the outside, where he’d be seen as a
boy in poverty, a laborer forced to perform
a dehumanizing task, but from the inside,
where he was in fact a little boy happy to be
spending time with his father.
Life was simple, aggressively so. The family
had no electricity for the first twelve years of
Guy’s life. The windows of his house had no
BY BEN GREENMAN
glass in them. There was no indoor plumbing.
He picked cotton and learned to ride horses.
Early on, Guy came to understand that the
world made noise. Or rather: he came to
understand that the world could be made to
make sound. Noise, ever present, was a clut-
ter and a clatter. Sound could be extracted
and examined. The first sounds that mattered
to him were the chirps and trills of the birds
in the trees. They sang songs, made melodies,
repeated their beautiful compositions as if
they were proud of them. Sound, in this way,
was alchemized into music. A family friend
who used to drop by the house with a two-
string guitar showed him that man could fly.
At some point, home improvements
brought window screens to the Guy home:
kept out the bugs, let in the air. Guy says
that when he looked closely at the screens,
all he saw was a lattice of guitar strings. He
pulled a wire out and made his own instru-
ment. His parents, alerted to his vandalism
by the mosquitoes on their skin, put an end
to the experiment, but Buddy just went back
to the laboratory, stretched strings from
hands to feet, looped rubber bands around
nails driven into walls. He did whatever he
could to put music into the air around him.
The Guy home didn’t get electricity until
the late Forties, when Buddy was twelve or
thirteen. Electricity brought the lightbulb,
but it also brought the phonograph. The
first record Buddy remembered hearing was
“Boogie Chillen” by John Lee Hooker, a song
that was itself a product of electricity. Elec-
tricity also brought him an encounter with
Lightnin’ Slim, an impromptu performance
by the older man that taught Buddy what an
amp could do, and it brought him Muddy
Waters on a jukebox. He was still playing
acoustic—his father bought him a makeshift
two-string, which held him for a while, until
a generous stranger bought him a Harmony
six-string.
In his teens, Buddy left Lettsworth for
Baton Rouge and better schools. His sister
lived there and he did too, for a little while,
before his mother had a stroke that brought
him back home. The whole family decamped
for Baton Rouge soon after that, Buddy’s
hope replaced by their heaviness. Buddy
started working, any job he could find. He
did time at a beer bottling plant and a gas
station and as a janitor at LSU. And he started
to build a life of music, hitting the bandstand
with local acts and eagerly seeing big names
when they came to town. (He was especially
taken with Guitar Slim, who had shoes in all
colors of the rainbow.) He upgraded from
his Harmony acoustic to an electric guitar,
a Gibson Les Paul.
People around him started talking down
Louisiana, or rather talking up Chicago. It
was, they said, the only real destination for
an ambitious and talented young man. The
streets were paved with blues. Buddy was
reluctant, or at the very least careful. A heed-
less change helped no one. What would he do
for work? What if he didn’t make it? People
laughed. Plenty of floors to clean, they said.
And so he went. The date is not in dispute:
September 25, 1957. Buddy has called it his
birthday, or at the very least the second time
he was born. The train took him through
Memphis, like all trains carrying musicians
should. A man in his car raised the question
of birds. They go south for the winter, he said,
and here was Buddy going north for it. The
comment hung there in the air, not quite a
paradox, not quite a joke, not quite an insight.
It’s Chicago. It’s the Nineties. The young
man is in a bar, going quickly through his
first drink so he can get to his second. There’s
no live music in the bar, but there’s a jukebox,
and it’s filled mostly with blues. A young
woman approaches the jukebox, jingling
a palmful of quarters. She picks her songs
confidently and then comes to the bar, down
a little ways from where he’s sitting. The
OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 55
bartender brings her a drink without her
asking. “It pays to be a drunk,” she says. Is
she joking? The bartender laughs. “If you
think that I’m going home with you, you’ve
been right before,” she says. The bartender
laughs again. The music is undistinguished
for the first song, and then the second, and
the young man is losing interest. But the
third song is familiar. It sits him up. It’s
drums and harmonica and also a guitar
that sounds like the sun reflected in a mir-
ror. It sounds like the man he glimpsed as he
went past the club. When was that? A week
earlier? Two. He can’t be sure. He considers
going to the jukebox to check the song, but
by the time he screws up his courage it’s over.
He considers asking the young woman, but
his courage is suddenly unscrewed. He says
nothing to her. It’s his loss.
W omen, weather, money made and lost,
drinks to calm the mind and drinks
to disarrange it. Newly arrived in Chicago,
Buddy was staying at an apartment with a
Louisiana friend whose hospitality fell short
of taking Buddy around town to find work.
Every day was a seesaw; Buddy would wake
up in the morning sure he’d make it as a
bluesman and go to bed at night more sure
that he wouldn’t.
One evening that first year, Buddy went to
the 708 Club, down on East 47th Street. He
had been drinking, only a little, but was more
than a little drunk on account of lack of food.
Otis Rush was playing that night and he said
from the stage he’d heard murmurs about the
new kid in the audience. He called Buddy up
to play. Buddy channeled everything he had
learned, along with everything he hoped
for and also everything he feared. It was a
star-making performance. He earned Rush’s
respect and then some—after the show, the
club owner sent him out to the street with a
message. “The Mud wants you.” Parked out
in front was a station wagon. The backseat
window slid down. The face revealed in the
half-light was Muddy Waters, who had come
to the club to see the hot young guitarist
everyone was talking about. Various versions
of this story have circulated. In one of them,
Muddy asked him if he was hungry and then
offered to make him a salami sandwich. In all
of them, Muddy said that he saw something
special in Buddy.
Buddy began to acquire altitude. But he
was not yet in order as a man. Sometimes
distracted by women, sometimes by money
trouble, sometimes too trusting, sometimes
56 WINTER 2021
too wild, he was unsure how far he could go
but certain that he wanted to get there fast;
in his memoir, he describes himself as “a
lost ball in high weeds.” He played weekly
cutting contests for liquor, often winning.
His technique came together: taut lines and
tight clusters of notes delivered at odd angles
and at high volume. And his showmanship
evolved. He was picking up on a tradition
that stretched back at least to Charley Patton,
who played behind his head, and extending
it. He played behind his head, behind his
back, between his legs, with his teeth, with
drumsticks. He threw the guitar in the air
and caught it without ever breaking out of
the song. Years later, his flamboyant style
would find its way to its greatest inheritor,
Jimi Hendrix, who studied both Guy’s playing
and his performances. Guy had a trademark,
which was a long cord from his guitar to his
amp that let him roam around the club and
play before taking the stage. The cord was a
metonymy: it represented his connection to
electricity. Buddy was reaching back to the
primal force that had formed him, return-
ing to the phonograph, to the jukebox, to
Magic Slim’s amplifier. He was switched on.
Even his misfortunes advanced the story:
When his Gibson Les Paul was stolen, desper-
ate for a replacement, he borrowed money
and bought a Fender Stratocaster, which
became his trademark guitar. With the help
of Magic Sam he went to Cobra Records and
recorded a pair of singles, “Sit and Cry (the
Blues)” b/w “Try to Quit You Baby” and
“You Sure Can’t Do” b/w “This Is the End,”
both of which featured Ike Turner, one of
Cobra’s mainstays.
Though Cobra collapsed, Buddy contin-
ued to gig around Chicago and environs,
and finally he was called up to Chess, the
city’s most influential label, to play on a ses-
sion for Howlin’ Wolf. As a sideman, Buddy
developed a separate personality, less flam-
boyant and histrionic than he was in the
clubs. This helped him get steady work, but
it also slowed his emergence as a solo star.
Put plainly, Buddy didn’t have much sup-
port at the label. Leonard Chess disliked
his showman mode but couldn’t see how his
sideman mode would put him across. Even
when it came time for him to record his own
sides, the label wanted to change his name
to “Buddy King.” When Buddy objected that
it would confuse matters—there was already
a B. B. King and a Freddie King—Chess re-
plied that confusion was the point. If people
weren’t sure which King they were buying,
maybe they’d pick up one of Buddy’s records
by accident.
With Chess, Buddy recorded a dozen-odd
songs over the course of the 1960s, most odd
indeed. Buddy had a hand in writing some of
what he recorded, and he was given able as-
sistance by Willie Dixon. Even so, the material
was hit-or-miss. “Slop Around” took a stab at
a dance craze, but it was abstract to the point
of comedy (try to follow the instructions). “I
Dig Your Wig” offered sly, propulsive com-
mentary on black hair and class, but it was
also a novelty song, not a stepping stone for a
young bluesman eager to assume the mantle
of Muddy or John Lee. Occasionally Chess got
it right, or Buddy got it right despite Chess.
In 1962, the pleasant but underwhelming
instrumental “Skippin’” was backed with
“Stone Crazy,” one of his signature compo-
sitions. And if you flip his “Wig” you’ll find
“My Time after While,” a razor-sharp slow
blues of promised vengeance.
From the distance of more than a half-
century, it’s clear that Guy was in some ways a
victim of history. Again, he had been born in
1936, fairly late for a bluesman. The acoustic
forebears of the genre, of course, came far
earlier, from Charley Patton (who was born
in 1890 or so) to Blind Willie Johnson (1897)
to Blind Willie McTell (1898) to Skip James
(1902)—Robert Johnson, born 1911, was a
trailing figure in that generation. But even
the electric blues players preceded Guy by
a decade or two: Howlin’ Wolf born in 1910,
Muddy Waters in 1913, Willie Dixon in 1915,
John Lee Hooker in 1917, Elmore James 1918,
B. B. King 1925. Guy was closer in age to the
rockers who followed him than to the blues-
men who preceded him.
It’s Chicago. It’s the Nineties. The young
man is back at the bar. He’s come looking for
the young woman. It’s not his first time back,
or even his second, but he’s located a reser-
voir of will. The times he’s come and failed
to find her, he’s passed the time by picking
out songs on the jukebox. He has found the
one she was playing that first time and dis-
covered that it was in fact the same man
who had been playing at the club he passed
that night. The coincidence pleases him, but
he has no one who can share it, not fully. All
actors must be present for a coincidence to
leaven into something approaching fate.
The third time back to the bar, he thinks he
knows how to bait the hook. He plays that
song, more than once, separated by less fate-
ful songs, and waits for the young woman
to appear. She can’t be far away. She herself
said she was a drunk. She never shows. The
young man takes out a book. “What are you
reading?” asks the bartender. “Oh, I can’t
read,” he says. “I just keep this in front of me
so I look smart. The hardest thing is know-
ing when to turn the page.” The bartender
doesn’t laugh. The young man listens to the
songs he has picked, especially that one song.
Each time, he’s more inside it than the last.
The young woman never shows. It’s her loss.
A s spotty as his Chess output was, Guy’s
more powerful songs—and especially his
incendiary live shows—landed with the Brit-
ish rockers. Buddy met the Rolling Stones
in 1964, when they came to record at Chess.
When he heard them on the radio, he could
tell that they had been picking up on what
he (and other American players) had been
putting down. His coming-out party, in a
sense, occurred the following year, when he
went to London to play the Marquee Club.
All the British rockers came out to see him,
including the triumvirate of Yardbirds gui-
tarists—Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, and Jimmy
Page. Rod Stewart met Buddy and offered
to drive him around town. Coming north to
Chicago had been the first step; going east
across the pond was the second.
And yet, it didn’t do much for his recording
career, at least not right away. Buddy’s first
LP, Left My Blues in San Francisco, came
out in 1967 and was a patchwork affair at
best, designed to capture the soul market as
much as the blues market (Charles Stepney,
who would form Rotary Connection and
later work with Earth, Wind & Fire, played
keyboards and orchestrated much of the
material). Guy left Chess for Vanguard and
put out A Man and the Blues the following
year, which was a little more coherent but
not much more successful.
Despite that, he remained a legitimacy
marker for the most prominent British bands.
In 1970, the Rolling Stones invited Buddy and
Junior Wells to open a series of shows on their
European tour. At the Palais de Sports in
Paris on September 25—thirteen lucky years
to the day after Buddy headed north from
Louisiana to Chicago—Eric Clapton jumped
on stage for “It’s My Life, Baby.” Clapton
supported Wells and Guy not just as concert
performers but as a recording act. They had
done a record back in 1965, Hoodoo Man
Blues, where Wells was the only artist billed
because Guy was blocked by Chess. (Buddy
was credited as “Friendly Chap.”) That album
remains a classic of soul-blues—the opener,
“Snatch It Back and Hold It,” is a straight-up
James Brown rip mapped back into 1950s
Chicago—and history has been corrected,
to some degree, in the sense that streaming
services now credit the record to both men.
Five years later, Clapton got the two of them
back in the studio, this time with equal bill-
ing, and produced Buddy Guy & Junior Wells
Play the Blues. Declarative title, definitive
record. Wells’s “Poor Man’s Plea” has the
most arresting verse (“Who’s been in here /
Since I’ve been gone? / Li’l black boy / With
a dirty horn / Tryin’ to love my baby”). But
the record peaks with Guy’s “This Old Fool,”
which was recorded with backing from the J.
Geils Band. It’s a somewhat standard blues-
rock song, up tempo, locked into its rhythm-
section-and-harmonica groove. Then comes
the final stretch, which is like a rocket launch
for Guy’s guitar. It’s not the virtuosity exactly.
Virtuosity doesn’t bring people to the blues,
and if it does, it doesn’t keep them there. The
soloing is a mix of angle and feeling, a nearly
perfect distillation of both defiance and pain.
The LP Clapton made with Guy and Wells
didn’t solve their recording problems, not ex-
actly. Buddy recorded sporadically through-
out the Seventies and Eighties, surfacing
here and there with incendiary albums—
the best of them, probably, is Stone Crazy!,
which came out on the Chicago indie label
Alligator in 1981. (The same year, the Roll-
ing Stones returned to Chicago to play a
gig with Muddy Waters at Guy’s club, the
Checkerboard Lounge.)
Then in 1991, Damn Right, I’ve Got the
Blues suddenly, surprisingly made him a true
solo star. There’s a whiff of calculation to
the proceedings thanks to highly publicized
guest spots from Clapton, Jeff Beck, Mark
Knopfler, and others. But when the songs
work (like on Guy’s cover of John Hiatt’s
“Where Is the Next One Coming From?”) the
sound of the thing is huge. Most importantly,
the record was a commercial and critical
comeback, putting Buddy on the Billboard
chart and netting him a Grammy for Best
Contemporary Blues Album. Damn Right,
I’ve Got the Blues kicked off a fertile record-
ing period for him. Albums became a regular
occurrence, as did Grammys (Feels Like Rain
won one in 1994, as did Slippin’ In in 1996 and
Blues Singer in 2004). The dark horse of the
bunch is Sweet Tea, from 2001, which was
nominated for a Grammy but didn’t win; it’s
more stripped down and intimate than the
others, suggesting a return to roots that may
have been more imagined than real. “Done
Got Old,” the opener, is a cover of a Junior
Kimbrough song from the early Nineties,
but Guy takes it slower, strips it down to its
skeleton, reconnects it with John Lee Hooker.
Guy has continued to record and tour in
the years since. He’s also become an ambas-
sador of the blues, singing the praises of not
only his contemporaries but the generation
that followed, and the generation that fol-
lowed them. Guy has developed a habit of
connecting with the young fans at his shows,
throwing them guitar picks, talking to them
from the stage. In 2018, during a show in Con-
necticut, he spotted a teenager in the crowd
who was yelling something about the guitar.
“Do you play?” Buddy said. The kid—a subur-
ban New Yorker named Marcky DiGiacomo,
fifteen, the same age Buddy had been when
he first moved to Baton Rouge—shouted back
that he did. Guy then brought him on stage
to jam. The future of blues is blurry, at best,
and Guy himself has lamented that when his
generation passes, the form may go with it.
But so long as he remains a going concern,
he has pledged to plug it in, to give it the
electricity it needs to go.
It’s Chicago. It’s the Nineties. The young
man has met another young woman. They
are at a bar. It’s her birthday. “I’m happy
to be here with you,” she says. There’s no
romance between them, only a friendship,
and the young woman has been exquisitely
clear that she has no intention of changing
the terms. “You know when people say it’s not
personal?” she says. “Well, this is personal.”
He laughs. “You laugh like I’m joking,” she
says. He laughs again. She wrings her hands,
gloved for winter, and makes a face of grief.
“The sad clown laughs,” she says. He orders
them both another round of drinks. She takes
out a bag. She has started a tradition of re-
verse gifting, where the person celebrating
a birthday is the one who gives presents. She
hands him a small package. “It’s a deck of
cards,” she says. “Tarot. I’m going to tell
you your future. You die in a fiery crash.”
But it’s not cards. It’s a cassette of an album.
And not just any album, but the album that
contains the song that he thinks he heard
on the jukebox in that bar months before,
which he still fervently believes is the song
he heard coming out of the club weeks before
that. Memory is a thicket in which you are
happy to be trapped. He takes the cassette
and thanks his best friend. She squeezes his
hand with her gloved hand. It’s his gain.
OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 57
58 WINTER 2021 “Invisible Man Retreat, Harlem, New York,” 1952, photograph by Gordon Parks © and courtesy Gordon Parks Foundation
 Where Is Jimmy Bishop?
N
o one knows what happened to
Jimmy Bishop. At least, no one will
tell me.
I’ve heard from Jimmy’s family
and friends that he was probably
born in 1938 or 1939, somewhere in rural
Alabama. He traveled north from St. Louis
where he was a popular DJ at radio stations
KATZ and KXLW and arrived in Philadelphia
in 1963. At the time, radio personalities were
celebrities, and he hoped moving to a bigger
market would open new doors.
Jimmy landed a job at WDAS, the City of
Brotherly Love’s most powerful Black radio
station, hosting The Jimmy Bishop Go Show
and spinning the latest hits from the Tempta-
tions, the Four Tops, and Dionne Warwick.
Stations like WDAS were groundbreaking
because the music they played and the voices
they broadcast catered directly to Black au-
diences. On a typical day in the 1960s, you
might hear the debut of the latest single from
the Supremes featuring Diana Ross, followed
by an exclusive live interview with Malcolm
X, followed by a comedy set or a community
forum. At the time, WDAS was the only place
you could hear any of this.
As a record and concert promoter, the
suave “Bishop of Soul” helped introduce
Philly to artists like the O’Jays, Aretha Frank-
lin, and the Jackson 5. And as a producer,
he was an early architect of “The Sound of
Philadelphia,” personally giving Rock & Roll
Hall of Famers Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff
some of their first songwriting credits.
When I mention Jimmy Bishop to people
who were his fans, I hear, again and again,
some variation of this: “He was just cool.”
And then they ask me: “Do you know what
ever happened to him?”
I learned about Jimmy in 2013 when I was
invited to help write and produce a pub-
lic radio documentary about the history of
Black radio in Philadelphia. Going Black:
The Legacy of Philly Soul Radio was about
WDAS and WHAT, the first two radio stations
that programmed for Black audiences in
BY ALEX LEWIS
Philadelphia. Hosted by the legendary Kenny
Gamble, who early in his career frequently
collaborated with Jimmy, the documentary
explored the birth and evolution of these
stations in Philly, their influence on the rise
of soul and r&b, and the roles these stations
played in the civil rights and Black Power
movements.
The format of stations like WDAS emerged
on the heels of pioneering institutions WDIA
in Memphis, the very first station to feature
all-Black programming and all-Black on-air
talent, and WERD in Atlanta, the first station
owned and operated by African Americans.
Inspired by the rapid growth of the Black
population in Philadelphia during the Great
Migration, a few progressive white radio
station owners realized the massive poten-
tial for advertising dollars in this expanding
audience. WHAT hired their first Black radio
announcer in 1945—possibly the first in the
nation—and six years later, WDAS switched
their music mix and programming to cater
to a Black audience.
I fell in love with radio at my college sta-
tion. The physical aspects were what at-
tracted me first: the dark control room, the
weight of the faders, the library of records
like a living history of music at my disposal.
It was exciting to be given license to play
an eclectic mix—Jason Molina, the Art En-
semble of Chicago, Laurie Anderson, and
New Zealand rockers the Clean—all during
a single shift.
This initial spark eventually evolved into
a passion for crafting audio documentaries
that could tell stories through collected in-
terviews, archival and field recordings, music,
and sound design. A cliché among radio and
podcast producers is that the intimacy of the
medium makes it so powerful; the idea that the
voices we broadcast are transmitted right into
your speakers or headphones. But to me, the
medium’s power lies in its boundlessness. Well-
crafted audio can hold us in several places at
once. It can transcend borders, power struc-
tures, and time. People long gone from this
world can resonate in the present moment.
As a young radio producer, I had hours of
fun listening to archival recordings of these
pioneering on-air personalities who were
championing the hippest music and redefin-
ing the medium so that it could bring joy,
hope, and solidarity to a community that had
been systematically oppressed and ignored
by mainstream media.
But Jimmy Bishop was a mystery from the
beginning. Although he had arguably been
WDAS’s most important program director in
its early days and a supremely popular on-air
personality, our documentary team couldn’t
find a single example of Jimmy talking live
on the radio. We checked local and national
archives, crowdsourced anecdotes from the
public, and spent many hours digitizing cas-
sette and audio tapes hoping to actually hear
Jimmy doing his thing. While we were able
to find recordings of even more obscure per-
sonalities, we were never able to find a single
snippet of his on-air voice.
Samples of Jimmy’s style do exist, though.
Search “Jimmy Bishop” on YouTube, and
you’ll come across recordings of Jimmy the
Impresario. For a time, he regularly hosted
concerts at the Uptown Theater in North
Philadelphia and the Nixon Theatre in West
Philly, the city’s premier venues for Black
performers.
In these recordings, his voice is warm and
confident. He keeps his introductions brief,
hyping the crowd up with a sentence or two
(“How y’all feeling? Feeling good?”), saying
just enough to introduce the act (“Here’s
the Delfonics!” “The Ambassadors!” “Billy
Stewart!”), and then moving out of the way
to let the artists shine. He never lets down
his icy cool exterior.
A comment on one of these YouTube videos
from user HaysEaglets reads: “I still have the
Saturday Night at the Uptown [vinyl] featur-
ing The Drifters also hosted by Jimmy Bishop.
Bishop just disappeared one day in the early
70’s & last I heard still hasn’t resurfaced. I
did hear a rumor that he became a minister.”
In addition to rumors of a spiritual voca-
tion, there’s also talk of the local mob, a
OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 59
payola scandal, or a gambling scheme. But
it’s all speculation.
L ouise Williams Bishop told me that she
and Jimmy fell in love quickly after they
first met. She was set up on a date with him
soon after he arrived in Philadelphia, where
she has lived since childhood. “He was not
a real bubbly personality,” Louise said. “He
was very quiet, but also very well spoken. He
seemed to be sincere, a nice guy.”
Known as the “Gospel Queen of Radio”
in Philadelphia, Louise Williams was the
voice of Sunday mornings on
WDAS. She would preach, read
scripture, and play records
from greats like Mahalia Jack-
son, Clara Ward, and Albertina
Walker. She had actually gotten
her start at rival station WHAT,
hosting what she called a “sen-
suous program, sponsored by
a wine company.” Eventually,
Louise was persuaded by Gen-
eral Manager Bob Klein to join
WDAS. She quickly became one
of the top-rated and, thus, top-
earning DJs at the station.
Louise told me that she in-
troduced Jimmy to Bob Klein,
and the men instantly liked each
other. It took some time before
Klein officially hired him, but
eventually Jimmy was brought
in to WDAS.
“He was young. He was ar-
ticulate,” Louise said about his
on-air style. “He was straight. He
didn’t talk any jazz talk. He did
a straight radio program with a
restrained voice. He didn’t have
some other made-up personality.
He was himself.”
When Louise says “jazz talk,”
she’s alluding to jocks like Jocko Henderson,
one of the most popular on-air personalities
in the early days at WDAS. He referred to
himself as the “Ace from Outer Space,” and
he was famous for rapping and rhyming on
the radio: “Eee-tiddly-ock! Ho! This is the
Jock, and I’m back on the scene with the
record machine, saying oo-pop-a-doo, how
do you do?”
The stars at most stations were the per-
sonality jocks who spoke to a common
experience. They became role models and
celebrities and broke Sun and Stax hits like
Rufus Thomas in Memphis, or expanded
60 WINTER 2021
opportunities for Black artists like Atlanta’s
“Jockey Jack,” Joseph Deighton Gibson Jr.
“One DJ described it that he became a
member of your family,” Portia Maultsby,
an emeritus professor of ethnomusicology at
Indiana University, told us for Going Black.
“That his radio style was so personal that it
seemed as if he was just in your home. And,
again, he spoke the language that African
Americans understood.”
In Philly, one of the most legendary mo-
ments on WDAS occurred on April 4, 1968.
Georgie Woods, “The Man With The Goods,”
broke the news on air that Martin Luther
King Jr. had been assassinated and took live
calls to give people an outlet for their grief
and anger. This was followed by wall-to-wall
gospel music hosted by Louise Williams. To
this day, WDAS is given credit for the way it
navigated that devastating moment.
Jimmy Bishop was “a less-is-more kind
of guy,” Harvey Holiday, a good friend and
colleague of Jimmy’s at WDAS, told me on
a phone call. “I stole some of his lines—he
could say a lot in five or six words. There’s
nothing more boring than someone who
makes their point and keeps talking. I learned
Jimmy Bishop (right) with Gladys Knight and Merald Knight Jr. Photo courtesy Jimmy Bishop Jr.
from Jimmy to make your point and get the
hell off.”
Harvey told me Jimmy did a recurring seg-
ment on his show where he played romantic
songs and, in his low, rich voice, called him-
self “The Love Man, Jimmy Bishop.”
Harvey also loved to talk about how Jimmy
was always late for his on-air shifts. He said
Jimmy would multitask by eating in the stu-
dio while he was on the air: “He’d be having a
steak. He’d have a four-course meal in front
of him and he’d have two people on different
lines. And he wouldn’t miss a beat. He would
talk to whoever he was talking
to, play a record, and then he’d
take a bite of steak. He was amaz-
ing in that way.”
“He was a top man in Phila-
delphia, and I enjoyed it,” Lou-
ise said. “But he wanted to do
what he wanted to do. And he
had become so big that he felt
WDAS was handicapping him.
He had an image of becoming
Berry Gordy grooming the next
Diana Ross. So that’s the direc-
tion he was traveling in.”
J
immy founded Arctic Records
in 1964. Prior to Arctic, he
had been a partner in another
label called Dynodynamic, but
with his star rising at WDAS, he
felt ready to strike out on his
own. At Arctic, Jimmy wrote
songs, oversaw the recording
sessions, recruited, and even
managed many of the artists.
While Arctic celebrated a few
hits—perhaps most notably with
r&b singers Barbara Mason (“Yes
I’m Ready”) and Della Humphrey
(“Don’t Make the Good Girls
So Bad”)—the label’s legacy is
defined by the young Philly-based talent it
helped nurture: Kenny Gamble, Leon Huff,
Harold Melvin, and Daryl Hall (yes, of Hall
& Oates fame) all got their start at Arctic. It
proved to be the training ground for Gam-
ble and Huff’s Philadelphia International
Records (PIR), which hit its peak about a
decade later in the early 1970s. PIR went on
to release over one hundred fifty gold and
platinum records and provided a platform for
hundreds of musicians in Philadelphia. (The
history and significance of Jimmy Bishop’s
Arctic Records is beautifully cataloged in
Cooler Than Ice: The Arctic Records Story,
 SOUTHERN MUSIC ISSUE VOL. 23
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released in 2013, which also includes the de-
finitive collection of every single—including
unreleased songs—that the label put out.)
Jimmy shut down the label in 1969, and no
one knows why. But his knack for recognizing
and managing talent was rewarded with a VP
position at CBS’s publishing house, April/
Blackwood Music, one of the biggest record
labels in the nation. Tasked with recruiting
talent, Jimmy introduced CBS to Gamble and
Huff. The network went on to distribute PIR’s
records until 1985. Jimmy had worked his way
to the top of the music industry.
By this time, the marriage of Jimmy and
Louise was on the rocks. They had four
children together; their youngest, Jimmy
Bishop Jr., is now in his early fifties. His
father was usually out
working when he was
growing up, he told me,
but he also has memo-
ries of celebrities con-
stantly turning up at
their house. “There was
a time where, if you’re a
Black artist, you didn’t
come into Philadelphia
unless you came to the
house,” Jimmy Jr. said.
“At the kitchen table
could be anybody from
Gladys Knight to Aretha
Franklin to the Jackson
5. Al Green, Tempta-
tions. They were all in
the house.” All these
artists felt indebted to
Jimmy and Louise for
being among the first to
break their records on
the radio and help them
land number-one hits.
“I’ll put it this way,” Jimmy Jr. continued,
reflecting on his three decades of working
in the same field as his parents. “For me,
especially when I have to carry the name—
it’s opened many doors. So, I’m grateful for
the name. I’m grateful for the work he did. I
was fortunate enough to follow in his steps
for a nice long run. It’s something that came
natural and it came easy.”
By 1971, Louise and Jimmy Jr. had more or
less lost touch with Jimmy. “I had divorced
or separated [from Jimmy] at that time, so
he was not beholden to me to explain every-
where he was going or what he was doing,”
Louise said. “So he went his way and I sorta
went mine.”
62 WINTER 2021
Louise went on to become an ordained
Baptist minister and served as a Pennsylvania
state representative for more than twenty-
five years. (She resigned her seat in 2015
amid corruption charges, but that’s a story
for another day.) She continues to preach and
play gospel music every Sunday on Philly’s
WURD, doing what she has done for nearly
sixty years.
I asked Louise if she would be interested in
finding out what happened with her ex-hus-
band: “I pray that he’s fine, that he’s happy,
and that he’s doing what he wants to do, but
I don’t have any desire to go meddling and
try to find out. I’m still where he left me right
here. I’m comfortable right here.”
O ne thing that fascinates me about Jimmy’s
disappearance is that it would be impos-
sible for someone with his public profile to
vanish off the face of the earth in today’s
world. There would surely be local news
clips, social media sightings, tracking data
on those creepy white pages websites. Some-
thing more.
A few people told me about encounters
with Jimmy in the years after he left Phila-
delphia. Jimmy Bishop Jr. said they haven’t
been in touch for about twenty years, but
that his father used to occasionally check in
on the phone and, on a few rare occasions,
visit the city to meet his grandkids.
Harvey Holiday relayed the story of a sad-
der encounter he had with his old friend in
Jimmy Bishop with the Temptations. Photo courtesy Jimmy Bishop Jr.
the 1980s: “He called me one day, and he
said he wanted to meet me. I met him at the
Marriott [in Philadelphia]. And, I would never
have recognized him. He had no teeth. If I
didn’t know I was meeting him, I wouldn’t
have known it was him. He’d been on a special
kind of diet. He only ate fruit or something
like that. And he asked me for a donation,
which I respected cuz if he asked me for a
loan, he wasn’t going to pay me back. So I
gave him some money.” Harvey told me he
had one or two more meetings with Jimmy
like this, but that was about it. “So after that I
heard he [was] running a gospel record label
in Tennessee,” Harvey said. “And that’s the
last I heard of him, roughly.”
If he’s still alive, Jimmy would be in his
mid-to-late eighties. He’s
been out of public sight
for fifty years now, and
there’s a very limited
number of artifacts left
showing just how tal-
ented he was. But Jimmy
Bishop’s significance is
felt in these memories
shared, the stories peo-
ple tell about him. And
his signature “cool” style
is imprinted in the DNA
of the music and radio
stations so many people
still love. He was an early
architect of a Black radio
industry that has since
been commodified, con-
solidated, and sold for
billions of dollars.
But I also wonder:
What if Jimmy just want-
ed to fade from sight?
What is the point of searching for someone
who doesn’t want to be found?
It’s in our nature to want to solve a missing-
person mystery. But when people ask, “What
happened to Jimmy?” maybe they’re mostly
just asking for a way to express their grati-
tude for his gifts.
I asked Jimmy Bishop Jr. what he makes
of people’s curiosity surrounding his father’s
disappearance: “It kind of captures his whole
concept: You gotta leave them wanting more.
And he did that! He hasn’t been on the radio
since the 1970s and they’re still talking about
him....The conversation’s never stopped. It’s
pretty amazing. God bless him.”
So if you’re reading this, Jimmy: Thank
you. And, where are you?
 Overnight Scenario
I
am at the club before my mother’s tears
are dry.
Me and my nine-girl crew slink in a
single-file line through an ocean of Black
bodies. EPMD’s “So Wat Cha Sayin’” got
us feeling subterranean; the air is thick with
the heat of rhythm, style, and so much swag-
64 WINTER 2021
BY KAREN GOOD MARABLE
ger. We’re headed to the front of the WUST
Radio Music Hall, snaking our way toward the
stage. The party is packed so we stick close,
even when someone sexy holds a glance,
touches an arm, mouths Let’s dance. We
smile and keep on moving, straight ahead
until a space presents itself and we plant our
Night Air, 2017, acrylic collage on panel by Angela Davis Johnson.
flag, circle up in the way girls do, dance with
ourselves. The DJ is taking us higher and we
raise our hands, surrender to the get-down,
laugh and give dap like we’ve known each
other forever even though we just met today.
Here’s to new friends, tonight is kinda special.
We done made it to the Mecca.
Courtesy the artist and Mosaic Templars Cultural Center
M y family’s hajj had begun three days
earlier when we packed our light blue
Buick LeSabre so fully, I straight up could
not see my brother, David, who sat beside
me in the backseat. Before we pulled out
the driveway, Daddy popped in his favorite
(and only) cassette, Aretha Franklin’s Who’s
Zoomin’ Who?, and we began our journey east
from my hometown of Prairie View, Texas,
upsouth to Howard University. First stop was
Port Arthur, Texas, at my Aunt Nita’s house.
She had barbecue chicken, potato salad, and
baked beans waiting and made a toast in my
honor. The next day we drove to Atlanta,
Georgia, where Aunt Tina whipped up a din-
ner of green beans, yellow rice, and baked
chicken and Uncle Billy told me, “Don’t call
my house asking for money.” On the third day,
after almost ten hours on the road,
Mama was so sick of being in the car,
she demanded my father find the
nearest Holiday Inn in Alexandria,
Virginia. Early that next morning,
we motored into Washington, D.C.
Daddy navigated Pierre L’Enfant’s
byzantine streets while Mama gazed
out the window. “I can’t believe I’m
about to leave my child here,” she
said, voice breaking.
In her defense, D.C. really was a
different world. This wasn’t the rural
town I was raised in, where one could
hear a nighttime chorus of katydids
and crickets, or the echo of the col-
lege drumline practicing across the
fields. Across the street from my
house, children played baseball in
the same space bluebonnets and
honeysuckle grew wild. There was
one gas station (Leon’s), one conve-
nience store (Super Save, which kept glass
jars of pickled eggs and pickled pigs’ feet
on the counter near the cash register), and
the nearest McDonald’s—built two years be-
fore—was five miles away. I’d long longed to
live in a city, a place where there was more
to do. I begged my parents to let me move to
Atlanta and live with my godsister, Phyllis,
or to Houston and stay with the McGees so
I could attend HSPVA (High School for the
Performing and Visual Arts). Mama wasn’t
having it. But Daddy had already given me
the keys to the kingdom. “You can go to any
college you want to,” he’d been saying since
I was knee-high to a bullfrog. “That’s my
gift to you.” Once I really started to think
about college, I was clear. “I’m going to the
Blackest college I can find the farthest away
from home.” Mama knew I wasn’t staying
home. She tried to sell me on South Carolina
State, her and Daddy’s alma mater; Spel-
man, where there was family nearby; and
Hampton, which had recruited young men
from Mt. Corinth Baptist Church to play on
the football team.
Ha.
My heart was set on Howard, the storied
HBCU with the great journalism department
that was literally a thousand miles away.
T he LeSabre pulled up to 2455 4th Street,
NW, also known as the Harriet Tubman
Quadrangle or “The Quad.” As far as I was
concerned, it was the promised land. We
parked out front and joined the dozens of
families unloading suitcases, bags, boxes,
We raise our hands,
surrender to the
get-down, laugh and
give dap like we’ve
known each other
forever even though
we just met today.
and crates out of their cars and into the fresh-
man women’s dormitory. Upperclassmen in
blue-and-white t-shirts and name tags sat
outside the building behind fold-up desks
and gave out room assignments. I was as-
signed to Wheatley Hall, named for writer
Phillis Wheatley.
When it was our turn, my family and I
loaded the elevator, pressed 4, then un-
loaded, taking a right and walking a few
doors down the carpeted hallway. My heart
was beating fast when I opened the door.
Inside were two twin beds, two desks, and
two closets separated by a window which
faced a greenspace in the back of the build-
ing. Toilets and showers were down the hall,
as was the pay phone booth. Coin-operated
washing machines and dryers could be found
in the basement. David plopped on one of
the beds as I stood in the middle of the space
pondering which side I was going to claim.
“Heyyyyy!” I turned to find a girl peek-
ing in the doorway. She had short, brown
cropped hair and a wide, winning smile. “I’m
Camesha.”
“Hey, Camesha,” we said in unison. I took
her in: tennis shoes, denim short overalls,
gold hoop earrings, a gold necklace, and a
yellow half t-shirt that matched her disposi-
tion. I liked her immediately.
“Where’s your room?” I asked.
“Come see.”
All of us crossed the hall and walked a
few doors down to the end where Camesha
introduced us to her parents and little sister.
She was blessed with a corner unit, slightly
larger and full of light thanks to two
windows—one in the front, which
showed the expanse of the campus,
and one on the side, where you could
see the Founders Library steeple and
the shuttle stop.
“Girrrrrl, this is nice!”
“I knowww right?”
Camesha was from Silver Spring,
Maryland, which she pronounced
“Murrlyn.” I told her I was from
Prairie View, which my scooped
Texas tongue pronounced “Prayer-
view.” She was enrolled in the
School of B(usiness); I, the School
of C(ommunications). Her longtime
boyfriend, Kenny, was a twin and
played football, and she loved to sing
and dance. While we spoke, our par-
ents laughed easy, engaged in their
own conversation.
“You should just be my room-
mate.” Camesha said this as if she’d been
hit by the bolt of a great idea. “Neither of
ours are here yet and we already know we
get along.”
I didn’t even have to think twice.
We rushed down the hall giggling like
eight-year-olds to clear the bright idea with
the dorm monitor, and squealed when she
gave us the green light. My dad and brother
moved my belongings across the hall; our
mothers helped us unpack. Clothes were
put away, beds were made, and after a few
hours, our families gave us tight, if not lin-
gering, hugs and, for the first time, left us
on our own.
Camesha and I ventured out to meet the
other girls on our floor. They hailed from
Long Island, Winston-Salem, Hartford,
OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 65
Oakland, and Brooklyn. We were all so dif- step back-kick. Camesha starts doing the 3 in the morning the pancake house!
ferent—funny girls, fashionable girls, girls Reebok, and I pick it up; I break into the 4 in the morning we’ll be rolling to my
with Jheri curls or slicked-back hair. Girls Robocop, and she’s right there with me. If house!
with curves, girls with glasses, and girls who one of us does a move the other doesn’t know, 5 in the morning the lights go out!
put on airs. What we all had in common was we observe the vocabulary, pump each other 6 in the morning you can hear her start
we were new here. So when someone pro- up—“Go roomie! Go roomie!”—then pick up to shout!
duced a flyer for a party happening that the step. When the DJ plays Oaktown’s 3.5.7.’s
night at a club close enough to walk to, nine “Yeah Yeah Yeah,” you can’t tell us we ain’t By the time the gruff emcee gets to 7 in
of us, including me and Camesha, hurried a part of MC Hammer’s crew, gyrating our the morning (she’ll be calling a cab), half
back to our respective rooms to get ready. I bodies before breaking into the Running the club, including Camesha, are shouting
chose a white short set with green and black Man just like in the music video. We acting the lyrics with him like a live band is onstage,
stripes, my Louis Vuitton belt (with Gucci on up, Camesha and I. Showing out. hands in the air. The already all-the-way-
the flip), and black flats. I unbuttoned my I’ve been waiting all my life for a party live party erupts and the beat hasn’t even
sleeveless vest top just enough so my lacy like this. To be shoulder to shoulder with dropped.
red bra peeked through. Camesha bumped young, gifted Black people from everywhere, Oh, but when it does. When the emcee
her stacks with a curling iron and slicked dancing in the dark to music I love and music repeats the verse, which at this point feels
the tapered parts down with more like a chant, and the
black Ampro Pro Styl gel. She drums kick in, it suddenly be-
put on jeans, her tennis shoes, comes very clear who is from
a blousy button-down, and a the DMV area (DC-Maryland-
burgundy lip. The song loops like a Virginia) and who the fuck
We met at the elevators a is not. Those of us who don’t
little after 9 P.M. and headed ring shout, like the know what’s happening, who
downstairs, out the Quad. Up don’t know this music, hum-
4th Street, then a left on Bry- ble and brace ourselves. The
ant, past the radio station and refrain in a gospel song moment is so pure and uncut,
the College of Nursing, and I dare not do a damn thing but
onto Georgia Avenue, where where the soprano, alto, stand still. I am hushed by the
we encountered other packs congas, silenced by the tim-
of freshmen; women from the and bass sections each bales, dared by...a cowbell?
same floor no doubt, headed The song loops like a ring
to the party, or McDonald’s, shout, like the refrain in a gos-
somewhere together, grouped have their say. I realize pel song where the soprano,
up in the name of safety, com- alto, and bass sections each
munity, and belonging. It took I am bearing witness have their say. I realize I am
about fifteen minutes to get to bearing witness to something
Georgia Avenue, then V Street, to something precious, precious, personal and home-
where we stood in line under grown. In this territory of less
the awning of the WUST, and than seventy miles, shared by
didn’t mind at all. personal and homegrown. over fifteen colleges and the
White House, the Black folks

H eavy D. is singing “Gyrlz,

They Love Me” and I am
throwing my whole body into
the Wop. I’m swinging my arms with my fists
balled up, whipping my shoulders, neck, and
head left to right. I’m leaning in on one leg,
backing up then shifting to the Cabbage
Patch, stepping side to side. I’m dancing
like nobody’s watching and like everybody’s
watching, feeling like I’m back home at a
party at the Newman center. My boy Maurice
Swanson and I would be in the middle of the
dance floor, snapping our necks from side to
side to “Paul Revere,” jumping into a twist.
Tonight, Camesha and I are doing the Kid
’n Play, including stopping mid foot tap, hold-
ing hands, and hopping in a 180 before the
I’ve never heard before. When “Voodoo Ray”
and “You Used to Hold Me” come on, I study
the footwork of cats from NYC, Chicago,
and Detroit, whose movement seems a com-
bination of African, breakdance, Nicholas
Brothers, and zero-gravity. I scream as the
entire club dances in slow motion to “French
Kiss.” I stand back when “Pirates Anthem”
and “Kuff” come on during the reggae set
and the girls from up North ease out of the
shadows like velociraptors and take center
stage, winding their waists.
But nothing, NOTHING, compares to when
the DJ plays this:
of Washington, D.C., let us
know in no uncertain terms:
This music belongs to us.
“C alling all dancers to the stage!”
The lights go up and the crowd turns
to see a guy onstage who is not the DJ grip-
ping the mic. “Calling all dancers to the stage
for the dance contest!” Almost everyone in
our vicinity looks directly at me and Cam-
esha. I can’t even blame them. For the last
two hours, she and I have been dancing like
our names are Scoob and Scrap Lover.
“Y’all better go up there!” This from my
traitorous fourth-floor Wheatley crew. If
only they knew. For all my good-time-girl-
ness, I do not like to be put on the spot. I’m

66 WINTER 2021
kinda like Michigan J. Frog in the old Looney
Tunes cartoons, the one who, when nobody
is around but his human, pulls a top hat and
cane out of nowhere and sings “Hello My
Baby” like he’s performing on Broadway.
Whenever his human tries to show him off
though, Michigan just sits there and croaks.
Before I can escape to the ladies’ room, my
feet are suddenly off the floor and I am lifted
onto the stage by some random guys. Cam-
esha is too, along with four other girls. (No
guys, because patriarchy.) Mortified, I steady
myself, stand up and dare look beyond the
lights into the crowd, which feels a little
like staring into the sun. I turn to Camesha
for comfort, but she, too, is facing front,
smiling and bouncing from side to side like
Mike Tyson.
The emcee spaces us ladies out, explaining
he’s going to go down the line and each girl
will dance to a clip of a song. After everyone
has a turn, he’ll go back down the line and
the audience will vote for each person by a
round of applause. The person with the most
applause wins. I look down at my shoes and
take a deep breath, wishing I had worn my
Filas instead of flats.
“DJ DROP THE BEAT!”
SAR-DINES!
HEY!
AND PORK AND BEANS!
A chorus of “Ohhhhh!” ripples through the
watchers. Oh Lord, it is the sacred music of
D.C. I am not ready. Not like this. Not like this.
The first girl gets her cue, and for about
twenty seconds, thrusts her chest in and out
to the beat, fists balled up like Rosie Perez
dancing to “Fight the Power.”
The second girl plays it safe and does
the Prep, cutting her hands back and forth
through the air on her left side, then steps to
the right and nods her chin with her hands
on her hips.
To be honest, I barely notice the third girl,
though I think she did some rendition of the
Roger Rabbit. Ever been next in a Soul Train
line and didn’t know what you were going
to do? That was me. I’m searching so deep
inside myself trying to find the groove, I’m
squinting. Oh, how this music mocked me!
“Aiight Short Set, you up!”
The beat drops, all eyes are on me, and I do
the only thing that comes to mind. I stand wide
and, leading with my shoulders and twisting
my wrists, snake my body down to the ground.
When I’m in an impressive squat, I double-time
snake to my left side, then to my right, then into
a semi backbend before rising up. The effort is
enough to garner a “WHOOO!” from the emcee,
an enthusiastic clap from the audience, and a
high five from Camesha.
Then...it’s her turn.
The music begins and Camesha looks the
audience directly in the eye, smiling a smile
that shows her teeth but is absolutely not
a grin. Starting from the tips of her toes,
homegirl begins bouncing her body, a si-
multaneous bounce-shake combination that
looks effortless but is executed with a force
far too intentional and punctuated to be
taken lightly. In mere seconds, the people
of the DMV begin to shout.
Camesha handles that shake like it’s a bas-
ketball and she’s a Harlem Globetrotter, first
letting it live in her neck, then travel down
her body, her shoulders, chest, breasts. She
lets the shake dribble down her waist, plays
with it for a second, then shifts the bounce
from hip to hip like a belly dancer. This heffa
then has the nerve to lean forward over onto
one leg and let the shake bounce off her
booty, hold it there, smile at the people, then
shimmy the shake back up her body, where
she just lets it ride. Oh my God. So mesmer-
izing, so dynamic is Camesha Antoinette
Everett, the DJ just lets the music play. The
music stops when she is done.
I look over at my new roommate like
“WHAT???”
We all know damn well who won; still, the
emcee insists on standing behind each of us
like Kiki Shepard and letting the audience
have their say. When he puts his hand over
Camesha’s head, the applause is deafening.
She beams, smiling that same winning smile
I encountered earlier that day, and I am in
awe of her. There is no prize but for the glory,
and the five of us make our way off the stage.
The same guys who threw me up there hold
out their arms to help Camesha and me down
and rejoin our girls. Like the Southern girl I
am, I smile through my shame. I am not ac-
customed to losing dance contests, especially
not on stage at my first college party in front
of hundreds of people. I have not been this
embarrassed since I fell down the stairs at
the Astrodome during the Jacksons Victory
Tour concert in ’84.
“OH MY GOD Y’ALL WERE SO GOOD!!!”
Cherisse is gagging.
“I can’t believe y’all were on stage!” says
Kenya.
“You could not have paid me to go up
there!” Corrin says, shaking her head.
“Y’all were fucking amazing,” says Mer-
edith. “Okay, I’m hungry.”
“Word.” Letania claps her hands. “Let’s
go to Mickey D’s.”
F all is coming; I can smell it as soon as we
step outside. Soon it will be cool enough
to rock the beautiful coats and chunky sweat-
ers I earmarked in the pages of Essence or
clocked Denise Huxtable wearing on The
Cosby Show—clothing I have little use for
in Texas. The nine of us walk down V Street
talking about the party, who was cute, and
how amazing the night was. But I am quiet.
3 in the morning the pancake house...is still
playing in my head. I can still feel the slap of
hands on drums; hear the call and response
of the people; feel the earthquake that was
Camesha’s bounce. The rhythm has burrowed
itself under my skin, and I realize I don’t even
know its name.
“Y’all.” I stop in the middle of Georgia
Avenue and wait for my hallmates to slow
their roll. “Can somebody please tell me
what the fuck just happened?”
Letania cocks her head. “Huh?”
“The music in the dance contest. What
was that?”
“You telling us you were onstage in a dance
contest and you don’t even know what you
were dancing to?” Letania got jokes.
“Yes. That’s what I’m saying. What was it?”
“Go-go?” Meredith looks at me under her
glasses. I shrug.
“Go-go,” Camesha says. “You’ve heard go-
go before! ‘Da Butt,’ ‘Shake Your Thang’ by
Salt N’ Pepa…”
Ahhhh. I had heard those songs, and more.
“Bang Zoom (Let’s Go-Go)” by the Real Rox-
anne. Grace Jones’s “Slave to the Rhythm”;
“Don’t Make Me Over” by Sybil. Even “Words
I Manifest” by Gang Starr, whose DJ—Pre-
mier—was from my neighborhood. In each of
those tracks, go-go was the foundation, the
bedrock, the hinge on which the door swung.
“It’s a D.C. thing,” Camesha says. “Tonight
was the real deal. Rare Essence, Junk Yard
Band.”
“What do they play in the clubs down your
way?” Cherisse asks.
“First,” I say, “there are no clubs in Prairie
View. But at the dances? Rap, soul, funk, slow
jams. Not go-go. You see I didn’t even know
how to dance to it!”
Meredith wraps one arm around my neck.
“You do now, youngin!” she says like the D.C.
folks, ushering me forward. “Welcome to
Chocolate City.”
OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 67
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Union County Heritage Museum
114 Cleveland Street
New Albany, MS 38652
662-538-0014 >ŝŬĞDƵƐĞƵŵ&ĂĐĞŬƉĂŐĞĨŽƌĞǀĞŶƚŝŶĨŽ
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84
CAN’T
YOU
SEE “RESCUE ME,” ON REPEAT

THAT
I’M BY DAVID RAMSEY

85
 THERE IS AN
OLD COUPLE ON
THE BOARDWALK
IN ASBURY PARK.
A little bit sunburnt, but he says they’re too
old to worry about that and she feels too old
to try to change his mind. Or they are in Fort
Myers, Florida. Or in Mexico City. Doesn’t
matter. The point is that they are holding
hands, and they are conscious of the way that
feels, skin on skin. The first time they held
each other’s hands was on a bright summer
day many decades ago. They have held each
other’s hands nearly every day since. It is so
familiar, the folds of skin, the little pocket
of moisture. But today, on this particular
bright summer day, it feels once again as new.
Perhaps because it was a hard year. A year
of distance, of possibility foreclosed. They
are pristinely attentive to every astonishing
detail of their hands. They decide to stop for
an ice cream. Or at a bar. Or at a shop hawk-
ing trinkets and need-nots. Doesn’t matter.
The point is that there is a song playing, and
they can hear it from the boardwalk. And he
begins to dance. And she begins to dance.
They have heard the song a thousand times.
That is not a figure of speech, it is literally
true. An undercount. And a little boy comes
to join them, his mother watching and laugh-
ing. He knows it, he knows the song, too. He
reminds the old couple of their grandson,
and they take his hands and shimmy. And a
woman walking alone stops and she doesn’t
dance, she is not in the mood to dance, but
she is in the mood to sing, and she sings along.
And the customers in the ice cream shop or
the bar or whatever—in Asbury Park or in
the south of France or in Paris, Tennessee
or wherever—they are singing along now,
too, because how could they not? Because
everyone knows this song. Because it feels
good to dance, feels good to sing with strang-
ers. They all know the words, even the little
86 WINTER 2021
boy, automatically, without even thinking:
“Can’t you see that I’m lonely? Rescue me.”
F ontella Bass is walking down Michigan
Avenue on a warm late summer day in
1965. Her grandmother, who helped to raise
her in St. Louis, died in January, and maybe
that is part of what prompted her to finally
make the move. She left the day after the
funeral. Later, she will try to explain: “I went
to seek the world.”
Chicago! Just the word has a charge. Her
husband, trumpet player Lester Bowie, says
Chicago is where the new music is. He says
it’s where any musician in St. Louis wants to
go. Later, he will try to explain: “Chicago is
a place where music is created. New York is
a place where it’s sold.”
Lester is a serious jazz player. He has
opinions. The songs that Fontella has been
recording with Bobby McClure, including
a couple of sure-enough hits—that’s just
“Mickey Mouse music,” Lester says.
Well. She knows this much: When the boys
at Chess Records are woodshedding, just
fooling around, and she comes in to sing—
something happens. They are on the cusp
of something.
That spring, civil rights protesters had
been beaten and gassed on the Edmund Pet-
tus Bridge in Selma; President Lyndon John-
son launched the Operation Rolling Thunder
bombing campaign in North Vietnam. That
summer, Johnson committed another 50,000
troops to Vietnam and signed the Voting
Rights Act into law. In August, the day after
Watts began to burn, the Garfield Park neigh-
borhood in Chicago erupted into several days
Previous spread: Fontella Bass, 1966. © Photoshot/Everett Collection
of violent protest after Dessie May Williams,
a twenty-three-year-old Black woman, was
killed in an accident with a firetruck.
Fontella is twenty-five years old, raising
her first child, trying to make it in music,
trying to make ends meet. She is walking
like she owns the avenue. The dusty Italian
word diva doesn’t feel so dusty anymore as
Fontella Bass struts down the street, feeling
the breeze off Lake Michigan.
Perhaps she missed the river. The neigh-
borhood she grew up in back in St. Louis was
about two miles from the Mississippi River.
The bends and turns in a river are called
meanders, named for the Maeander River
in Asia Minor. Meander down the Missis-
sippi River and you can trace your way back
to Arkansas, where her grandmother came
from. And the Mississippi Delta, where the
men she played with in St. Louis came from.
Ike Turner. Little Milton. Oliver Sain.
Maybe she thought of the river as she
walked to the studio to get to work. Perhaps
she still felt the old meanders and rhythms
of home.
Here I’m speculating. But a few things I can
confirm: It’s true about her grandmother, and
about Lester. And it’s true that soon she will
walk into the Chess Records studio at 2120
S. Michigan to cut a new song for the label's
subsidiary Checker in three takes. And it will
be so groovy and exultant, so inexhaustible,
that it will stick to the culture like bubble-
gum. It will be a hit in Chicago and in St.
Louis and all over the country. It will be a
hit across the ocean in England, too, and it
will be a hit among the soldiers in the jungle
more than eight thousand miles away. It will
be a hit everywhere.
That much is true.
And it is true that many years later, she will
try to explain: “I was being rescued from a
lot of things at that time.”
S he was a gospel singer, always was.
Fontella Bass was born the day before
the Fourth of July in 1940, named after a
friend of her mother’s. “My mom said she
knew that I was going to be a star one day,”
she explained. “So that’s how I got the name.”
Martha Bass, her mother, toured the coun-
try with the renowned Clara Ward Singers
when Fontella was a child, and her grand-
mother, Nevada Carter, was an acclaimed
gospel singer in her own right. And so the
family could not have been surprised when
they heard Fontella’s voice at the Pleasant
Green Missionary Baptist Church in St. Louis
or when she showed a knack for the piano
as a five-year-old prodigy. She had what the
church would have called a gift, what the
talent scouts would have called “it.”
“My mother sang, but when I came along
I stretched it out further,” Martha Bass told
the New York Times in 1989, describing the
family tradition. “Fonnie stretched it out
further.”
As young as nine, Fontella would travel
with her mother and grandmother around
the South and beyond as a multi-generational
family act. They would take up a collection
in three baskets so people could give to their
favorite. The tours continued periodically
until well into Fontella’s teenage years, when
she could no longer pass for twelve to get a
free ticket on the train.
By her own account, Fontella first started
gigging when she was five years old, tagging
along with her grandmother to perform at
wakes at funeral homes in St. Louis. Funeral
directors like Buddy Walton and Ellis Jones
would try to shepherd her in and out with-
out seeing the bodies (“so all I smelled was
flowers,” she recounted later).
She was paid $7 a night. “And if I was good
I got paid $10,” she said. “You know, in 1945,
’46, $10 was a lot of money for a five-year-
old.”
It spooked her, but business was good:
“Every night we’d get another dead body.”
I ’m not going to tell you a story about the
first time I heard “Rescue Me” because I
don’t remember ever not knowing the song.
It is snugly in the middle of the soundtrack of
my life. Not tied to any particular memory or
any particular time or any particular place
or any particular person. But evocative of
memory nevertheless.
I do remember posters for the movie
Jumpin’ Jack Flash, which came out when I
was seven years old. It’s a Whoopi Goldberg
vehicle about Cold War espionage and I guess
what would pass for mind-bending computer
hacking in the mid-1980s. It’s so deliriously
out of date that it’s amazing you can still
stream it, but you can. At one point, Whoopi
is in a payphone booth and then suddenly
a sinister KGB agent hooks the booth with
a tow truck. And there it is: “Rescue Me.”
The truck rips the booth out of the ground
and drags it, with Whoopi trapped inside,
Fontella Bass c. 1963 courtesy PRANN Records.
through downtown Manhattan. Come on my grandparents. My mom is driving and
baby and rescue me. she is grooving. We are listening to 96.3,
It’s Fontella’s version in the film (a medio- the Nashville station which converted to an
cre cover made the official soundtrack), and oldies format that year. “Rescue Me” is play-
it brought the song renewed attention. So ing, part of the canon of decades-old hits in
I must have heard it then. And no doubt it constant rotation.
was in rotation at home. My dad was trying Here’s the writer Lucy Sante on oldies
to indoctrinate me with his love of classical radio: “a medium of chattering middle-aged
music, but he had realized the same thing men, audibly overweight, short-sleeved even
I would when I became a father decades in the dead of winter, who are capable of put-
later: Children love 1960s pop. I would have ting on the spookiest sides without seeming
been sliding in my socks to the Supremes to notice the weirdness as they jabber on
and jumping on the bed to the Monkees. about trivia before and after.”
Cue Fontella. These few hundred songs, over and over
The way that bass line slinks in like a spy. again. The Golden Oldies.
As familiar as the pulse of my pulse, as the My mother loves to sing along. She likes to
sound of my footfalls. dance with one arm while she drives with the
other. It’s hard to say whether she’s nostalgic
for the songs of her teenage years, or whether
it’s the oldies format itself that has embedded
I t was supposed to be a B-side. Or at least
that’s one version of the story floating out
there: She had previously recorded “Soul of
these songs so deeply into our consciousness
that it is difficult to imagine driving together,
me and my mom, without them.
the Man,” a gospel-tinged blues
scorcher, and they needed a new
song for the flip. In any event, when
the record came out, Billboard
magazine spotlighted “Soul of the
Man” as the top side, predicting a
“hit for Miss Bass”—perhaps the
source of that rumor.
There are so many stories about
how “Rescue Me” came to be that
it’s hard to know what’s what.
Here’s one: During the recording,
on an impulse, producer Roquel
“Billy” Davis walked around
to each player, one by one, and
tapped them on the shoulder to
stop, so that it’s finally just the bass
line and Fontella’s voice. And then,
when it was over, a long silence in
the studio. Because everyone knew.
“When we were recording that, I
forgot some of the words,” Fontella
told the New York Times in 1989. In
some versions of the telling, the lyr-
ic sheet actually fell off the music
stand. “Back then, you didn’t stop while the Perhaps in the future, the music apps will
tape was running, and I remembered from track it all, but all I have is the hazy power
church what to do if you forgot the words. of my brain to populate the past with song:
“I sang, ‘Ummm, ummm, ummm,’ and it In the Plymouth with Mom, windows down
worked out just fine.” because the AC was shaky, radio turned up so
we could hear over the breeze, on the way to
school—unembarrassed, I am singing along,
too. Rescue me. At the wedding, at the party,
I ’m eleven years old, in the passenger seat
of a Plymouth Duster we inherited from
in the drunken thrall, alone in my room, at
the grocery store. Impromptu dance sessions
OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 87
with my daughter when we were all cooped
up together, jumping around the living room
while the cherry blossoms bloomed outside
the window—when my wife and I were trad-
ing parenting and work like relay racers,
a loop with no finish line, rescue me. The
song is so familiar that it can fade into the
background if you let it. Don’t let it. Listen
with your body. How easy and free Fontella’s
voice was for all of its Sunday morning force,
how cool and cozy. My daughter says to play
it again and we play it again, and again and
again. I have the dad’s instinct to explain—to
try to tell her how a song like this can bring
us joy on a hard day, can bring us together,
but she is laughing, she is shaking her hips,
right in time.
“I t’s the everyday living that
I like about ‘Rescue Me’
because everybody needs to be
rescued,” Fontella said in 2004.
“Everybody needs to be loved.”
A s a teenager, Fontella
played piano or organ at
various churches around the St.
Louis area, including Morning
Star Missionary Baptist Church,
which bought its first organ for
Fontella to play (at this time,
despite eventually winding up
as musical director for multiple
church choirs, she was too shy
to sing).
Her mother and grandmother
generally disapproved of secular music. “Be-
ing in the church, my grandmother was very
hard-cored, you know,” Fontella explained in
a 1986 interview with Blues Unlimited. “They
didn’t want me to listen to rock on the radio.”
When Fontella was around sixteen, her
grandfather and a couple of her uncles would
take her on secret trips to juke joints, all over
the area. Spots like Ned Love’s and the Red
Top, across the river in East St. Louis.
“They would sneak me out of the window
and I would dress in the car and I would
be gone all night, till six and seven in the
morning,” she recounted later. “They’d send
a note up and I’d go up and…sing and dance
or play the piano....
“And then they would sneak me back in
the house…they did it for years.”
88 WINTER 2021
The first time she got busted was when
she played piano with a band in a talent
show held before a Ray Charles concert at
the Club Riviera.
“And all my mother’s church members was
calling, ‘Did you see your daughter’s picture
in the paper?’” Fontella recalled later. “There
I was on the piano getting down.”
“All hell broke loose,” she told the St. Louis
Post-Dispatch in 2004. “I got my ass whipped
over Ray Charles.”
At seventeen (or a bit older; accounts
vary), she got a job performing at the Show-
boat Club near the northern tip of the city,
where the Chain of Rocks amusement park
then overlooked the Mississippi River from
the bluffs. Later, she took on a gig with Leon
Claxton’s traveling carnival show, which was
THE SONG IS SO FAMILIAR
THAT IT CAN FADE INTO
THE BACKGROUND IF
YOU LET IT. DON’T LET IT.
LISTEN WITH YOUR BODY.
in St. Louis for two weeks. She made $175 a
week and decided to leave St. Louis and go
on the road with the carnival. “That was the
greatest gig in the world at that time,” she
said. But her mother got word and showed
up to (literally) pull her off the train.
“My mother came and took me off the
train, I mean bodily,” she said. “I was so em-
barrassed, because I thought I was grown.
She said, ‘No way.’ Bip, boom, bam! And I
was off the train in two jumps.”
Local musicians Oliver Sain and Little Mil-
ton spotted her at the carnival and hired her
to play piano in their band.
They played the local circuit—the Moon-
light, the Masonic Hall, the Manhattan Club
in East St. Louis, Chuck and Al’s in Brook-
lyn, Illinois. And they toured through the
South—Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas.
“We couldn’t stay in the hotels or use the
bathrooms in the South—we used to have to
live with people that we knew,” she said. “I
tell you, the road was rugged. Last stop for
the bathroom: Memphis.”
One night, Little Milton got too loaded on
scotch, so Sain asked Fontella to take the mic.
“And I just never stopped,” she said.
F or the last eighteen months or so, I have
felt a little bit like Whoopi in that tele-
phone booth. You know?
I keep trying to pitiably assert control,
but really I’m just hollering and hanging on.
Putting a song called “Rescue Me” into
heavy rotation during this pe-
riod is a little on the nose, I real-
ize. But this is not a season for
subtle medicine.
“The secret lies in simplicity,”
Fontella said in a 1966 interview.
The key to composition, she said,
was to “find an easy phrase in
current use which everyone says
ten or twelve times a day.…Titles
like ‘Rescue Me’…are so simple
that they make people think
‘why didn’t I think of that?’—
that’s when you know you have
a winner.”
Pop music is meant to be
popular, natch. It is meant to be
immersive and sticky. It is meant
to seduce into comfort. To be a
hit, a song has to wallop us, it
has to be a showstopper—but
it also has to worm its way into
the background of our lives. It is only later
that we even notice the chorus’s first line in
the song that made Britney Spears famous:
“My loneliness is killing me.”
The other day I heard an interview from
2019 with the neuroscientist and opera singer
Indre Viskontas. She said that “repetition is
the one universal feature of virtually every
music that we know of.” An accident of the
way we’re wired, perhaps: We make meaning
out of patterns. I am playing “Rescue Me”
as I type this, and I know what’s coming:
here come the horns, here come Fontella’s
hums, and it is beautiful, even still. Verse,
chorus, verse.
Viskontas said something else in that same
interview, something that stuck with me.
“When you bounce in sync with someone
else to music, you actually raise levels of an
attachment hormone called oxytocin in both
of your brains,” she said. “And that makes
you feel more bonded.”
Experimenters have tried bopping along
in rhythm with subjects, she said, and found
that they’re more likely to do little acts of
social kindness for the experimenter after-
ward. Toddlers are more likely to help pick
up an object that was dropped if they’ve
bounced in sync with an adult. I never know
what to make of experiments like that. But
I can report that when the weddings were
canceled, and the bars closed, and the ven-
ues shuttered, it turned out that this was
what I missed the most. Listening to music
with strangers. Dancing with friends. I didn’t
just feel isolated. I didn’t just feel lonely. I
felt—I don’t know how else to put it—out
of sync.
S he was five-foot-four. She played chess
and collected briar pipes. Her drink of
choice was rum, favorite food steak.
These are among the responses she gave
for the article “Life-Lines of Fontella Bass,”
published in the British New Musical Express
in December of 1965. She was in England for
a promotional trip for “Rescue Me,” which
entered the English charts that month, ap-
pearing on the television programs Ready,
Steady, Go!, Discs A Gogo, and the BBC’s Top
of the Pops, where she was presented with
her gold record. As far as I know, this was
her first trip to Europe. Back home, “Rescue
Me” spent four weeks at number one on the
r&b charts, and made it to number four on
the Hot 100. It all happened so fast.
Biggest influence on her career: Nat King
Cole and Pearl Bailey. Favourite singer: Billie
Holiday. Favourite bands/instrumentalists:
James Brown. Favourite clothes: Casual.
Car: Pontiac.
In just a few years, she would break with
Chess Records, and for the rest of her life,
she insisted that she was cheated out of what
she was owed for “Rescue Me.” She would
never again have a hit anywhere close to
that scale. She and Lester would move their
family to France, where she periodically sang
and played piano with his avant-garde col-
lective, the Art Ensemble of Chicago. “I was
always a little avant-garde,” she said. And
later she and Lester would split—and she
would eventually return to St. Louis, and to
gospel, including touring with her mother
like the old days. But she always sang “Rescue
Me,” every time she performed. She died the
day after Christmas, 2012, of complications
from a heart attack. One St. Louis television
station began its obituary: “You may not im-
mediately recognize her name, but there’s a
good chance you can easily sing along with
her signature tune.”
There is something so intimate about a
song we know well, something familial about
that voice in our earbuds. Which perhaps ex-
plains my inclination to hunt the newspaper
archives, to dig up these forgotten interviews,
to savor these trivial details. Because when
a song gets its hooks in you, it unfolds into
stories, it latches onto memories, it colors in
the margins of your life. And so our instinct
is to seek to know the story of the singer, too.
Her name was Fontella Bass.
Best friend: Too many to mention. Most
thrilling experience: Coming to Great Brit-
ain.
Tastes in music: Jazz, gospel, r-and-b.
Personal ambition: To travel. Professional
ambition: To be an entertainer throughout
the world.
Biggest disappointment in career: None
really. Things have just been swinging!
T odd Storz, owner of KOWH in Omaha,
Nebraska, was at a diner in the early
1950s, the story goes, when he noticed
something. A patron would amble over to
the jukebox and play a song. And then a few
minutes after the song was over, someone
else would come to the jukebox and pick
the very same song. And the waitress, when
she got a tip, she would drop a nickel in the
jukebox to play her favorite new song—that
same one, over and over again. People want-
ed to hear the hits, and their appetite was
insatiable. Storz decided he could replicate
this on his radio station. And so he began
playing the biggest songs of the day, several
dozen of them, in constant rotation, with
no other programming. This sounds simple,
but it was a brand-new way of doing radio:
Storz is often credited with pioneering what
became known as Top 40 radio. He brought
the KOWH format to other stations across
the country, and everywhere he broadcast,
he found the same thing. The insight is fa-
miliar to parents of small children. If a song
really pops, we don’t want to hear it just
once, or ten times. Play it again. We can’t
get enough.
F ontella knew that “Rescue Me” would
be a smash.
“I had the demo and those folks wore that
demo out,” she recounted. “Every time I’d
put it on, they wouldn’t take it off the box.
They’d just play it over and over and over.”
Chess Records had made its name in blues,
but had brought in a stable of talent that
could bring the soul and flair of the Motown
sound, including producer Billy Davis, re-
cruited from Detroit, where he had sung with
an early incarnation of the Four Tops and
collaborated as a songwriter with Motown
founder Berry Gordy. Davis, who would go
on to help write the Coke jingles that you
can’t get out of your head (including “I’d
Like to Buy the World a Coke”), had a knack
for knowing what could make a song swing
and pop. On Fontella’s previous hit, “Don’t
Mess Up a Good Thing,” a duet with Bobby
McClure, Davis suggested the tempo that
enlivened what had been a flat session, ac-
cording to McClure. “Do you do the Uncle
Willie?” Davis asked, a dance then popular
in the Chicago scene. “Let’s put it there.”
Take a minute, now. Put on “Rescue Me.”
What a house band they had. There is Maurice
White on the drums. He would go on to found
Earth, Wind & Fire, but spent more than four
years as a session drummer at Chess, what he
called “Chess University,” keeping time behind
Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf. On the bass,
his future Earth, Wind & Fire collaborator
Louis Satterfield. Saxophonist Gene “Daddy
G” Barge led the horn section, added after
the initial recording, which included a turn
from Satterfield on the trombone. The ele-
ments layer and build—guitar, organ, piano.
Backing vocals from the Gems, featuring then-
seventeen-year-old Minnie Riperton, who also
did a stint as a receptionist at the studio.
And Fontella. When I listen to her perfor-
mance, I forget altogether that the material
here is a milquetoast love story. In her voice,
“Rescue Me” has an everyday urgency, a
defiant joy. Like a kind of prayer.
I ’m forty-two years old, driving my daugh-
ter Marigold, who has just turned four,
home.
“Rescue me!” she shouts from her car seat.
I put it on. “On repeat,” she adds. On re-
peat, on repeat: her request and refrain. Just
as a joke, if funny once, is funny a thousand
OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 89
times—if she loves a song, she loves it again
and again. Her demands are insistent and
urgent, her preferences specific and endur-
ing. For the whole month of June, she woke
up every morning wanting to hear “Dreams”
by the Cranberries; in July, it was “Rescue
Me.” (I try to be strategic about my sugges-
tions. I thought that I could not tire of TLC’s
“Waterfalls.” I was wrong.)
I’ve got one hand on the steering wheel
and I’m dancing with my other hand. Mari-
gold is exploring the boundaries of possible
movement while strapped in a car seat. She
is shrugging and shaking and reaching and
scooching. She is singing along, with some
slight variations (“I need you / and your rub,
too”). Her eyes are upward and her mouth is
wide open in a smile. We look at each other
through the rearview mirror. In sync.
“We are having a party,” she says.
“We are having a party,” I agree.
“Mama is going to be surprised what a big
party we’re having,” she says.
“A full-on dance party,” I say.
“Full-on dance party,” she says.
She adds that we’ll tell Mama that we had
the biggest party we’ve ever had, and that
Mama will be very, very surprised.
And can I say that it really was a pretty big
party. That it felt like partying. Like the thing
I’ve missed: that catharsis, that connection,
that sense of timeless abandon.
The most profound fact about someone
you love is their otherness. Their mystery and
their resistance. And this is what is beautiful
and difficult about your child turning from
an extension of yourself in infancy into a wild
thing of their own. But still, there are mo-
ments, like this one. Where the gap between
you and a person you love feels so small.
When the song ends, it starts again. “It’s on
repeat!” Marigold shouts. “You knew that’s
what I wanted!”
T he songwriting credit on “Rescue Me”
went to a pair of in-house songwriters at
Chess: Raynard Miner, then around nineteen
years old, a blind musician who had been
writing songs since he was twelve, and his
writing partner Carl Smith, who had a knack
for fleshing out the story in a song’s lyrics.
The creative atmosphere at Chess was free-
wheeling and loose—musicians would fool
around in rehearsal studios as producers,
arrangers, and performers popped in and
out, jam sessions turning into songs.
90 WINTER 2021
Some version of this process seems to have
led to “Rescue Me,” but just how it happened
was a matter of hot dispute between the team
at Chess and Fontella.
Miner and Smith first developed the bones
of the song in a rehearsal space across the
street from the Chess headquarters, accord-
ing to an account described in Nadine Co-
hodas’s book on Chess Records, Spinning
Blues Into Gold. They brought the song, with
the working title “Take Me With You,” to
producer Billy Davis, who suggested calling it
“Rescue Me.” According to Miner and Davis,
they worked it up with some of the house
musicians at Chess and then got the tape to
Fontella, who was initially skeptical.
Other accounts, such as Robert Pruter’s
telling in his book Chicago Soul, place Fon-
tella in the room with Miner and Smith, along
with arranger Phil Wright, for the “wood-
shedding” session on an August Saturday
that led to “Rescue Me.”
Certainly Fontella remembered it very
differently from the story told by Davis and
Miner. She said that she stopped into the
studio while Miner was working on the song
and helped develop key elements, including
the melody. “I just literally wrote the song,”
she told Cohodas. “You know anybody can
do rhythm takes. You have to put the melody
over the top of them….I was tricked out of
the publishing.” She said she asked about
getting songwriting credit at the time, and
Davis assured her that it would be taken care
of, but it never was.
Davis told Cohodas that Fontella “had
nothing to do with the writing” and Miner
concurred. In a later interview, Davis would
credit her only with “a bunch of ad-libs—that
doesn’t make someone a songwriter.” Louis
Satterfield, the bass player, said “she didn’t
do nothin’ but sing the song.” Pete Cosey, who
played guitar, gave her a little more credit,
saying that by the time everyone gathered
in the studio to record, “there was a definite
song. It was more than a skeleton. There was
a body, but Fontella embellished quite a bit,
especially the ending.”
“I would have been set for life, if I had
been paid,” Fontella said. The dispute may
have been tangled up in larger frustrations
with relatively low payments Chess made
to artists, and a general lack of artistic con-
trol. (“They definitely wanted to keep the
same groove,” she told Terry Perkins of the
Riverfront Times in 1991. “I mean, honey,
nobody was creative enough to say let’s break
away and show what Fontella can really do.
Instead it was ‘Let’s just hold it right here,
babe, and do the same old thing.’”) When
Leonard Chess, the label’s cofounder, gave
her a royalties check for her “Rescue Me”
performance—according to Fontella, $11,000
and the only check she received for the hit
from Chess—she was furious.
“I had the first million seller for Chess
since Chuck Berry about ten years before,”
she told Perkins. “Things were riding high
for them, but when it came time to collect
my first royalty check, I looked at it, saw
how little it was, tore it up and threw it back
across the desk.”
“I’m the kind of person,” she said in a 1984
interview, “who is always going to respect
you and will always expect that kind of re-
spect in return. The recording companies
had been taking advantage of Black musi-
cians for a long time, and I decided to take
a stand against it, but I was standing alone.
I was a Black female, so I automatically had
two strikes against me in that white world.”
“It actually sidestepped me in the busi-
ness because I got a reputation of being a
troublemaker,” she said later.
Fontella recounted one day when Leonard
Chess, fed up with her and popping nitro
pills for his heart condition, said, “I just don’t
know about you, Fontella. The trouble with
you, Fontella, is you don’t trust no one, you
don’t even trust your mother.”
She didn’t skip a beat: “You’re right Leon-
ard. ’Cause I know if I got some money in my
purse my mother gonna take it.”
I f “Rescue Me” was featured in a film
soundtrack prior to Jumpin’ Jack Flash,
I’m not aware of it. It’s so cinematic, and the
chorus so ready-made for movie chases and
high suspense, that this seems surprising.
But perhaps the song was less ubiquitous
in the years between its release and my child-
hood memories. Certainly “Rescue Me” has
been played on oldies radio many orders of
magnitude more times than it was in its hey-
day. The oldies format dates at least back to
the early 1970s, but all-oldies stations became
more widespread in the 1980s. Oldies radio
used a version of the Storz formula: Listeners
wanted a certain kind of nostalgia evoked by
the familiar, so the format often sticks with
several hundred songs recycled ad infinitum.
It’s great! But we’re also pummeled by this
repetition. Nothing defangs a piece of art
like becoming iconic. What do I really, really
think of the Mona Lisa? How could I possibly
know? I’d like a designer drug that lets me
watch Marlon Brando’s opening scene in The
Godfather as if for the very first time, with
no context at all.
The problem is even more acute for popu-
lar music, which derives some of its power
from the fresh surprise of the new. “Rescue
Me” is everywhere. “Every time I go to New
York, I can’t get out of the tunnel before I
hear ‘Rescue Me’ on the radio,” Fontella Bass
said in 1996. It has been featured in countless
commercials and more than half a dozen
movies since Jumpin’ Jack Flash, including
Air America; A Cinderella Story; Best; In the
Army Now; I, Robot; and Mo’ Better Blues.
And, of course, Sister Act—Whoopi once
again, cleaning up at the convent in a mon-
tage while Fontella wails and the horns blare.
A 1988 Slim-Mint television ad featured a
goofy version of “Rescue Me” as people were
tempted by pizza and cherry cheesecake,
only to be rescued by the diet-aid gum; the
ad’s creative director explained that the spot
was meant to be “very positive and uplift-
ing and helpful to people.” At some point,
as “Rescue Me” plays on a re-run of ER, we
become so oversaturated that this singular
masterpiece risks winding up calcified as
cultural wallpaper.
Or worse, misremembered as Aretha
Franklin singing “Deliver Me” on a Pizza
Hut commercial: “Deliver me, I want you in
my hands…Come on Pizza Hut, deliver me…
’Cause I’m hungry, yes it’s true.”
N early twenty-five years after “Rescue
Me” raced up the charts, Fontella Bass
was broke. It was an icy winter and a storm
had knocked a tree onto her house near St.
Louis. She wound up without a car, without
heat, and had her telephone cut off.
“I needed a new roof, I needed a furnace,
I needed a hot water tank, I needed many,
many, many things,” she said in a 1995 in-
terview with Cheryl Andryco, who made a
documentary on Fontella as part of a master’s
thesis. Over Christmas, she said, her four
children, now grown, gave her a pep talk:
“‘it’s time for you to be Fontella again and
stop trying to be Mom.’ That sort of snapped
me back into it.”
On New Year’s Day, 1990, she had tea with
her youngest daughter; with no working
furnace, they had the gas stove turned on for
heat. At this point, she was hoping for a sign.
And then, from the black-and-white tele-
vision in the kitchen: “We heard something
go, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da...”
Then her own voice—an American Express
commercial that had licensed “Rescue Me”
without Fontella’s permission. She eventu-
ally sued American Express and reportedly
received a significant settlement.
I don’t know if this is exactly how it hap-
pened, but here’s how she told the story: “I
walked into the court and I was a nervous
wreck. The lawyers were all there at this long
table and then finally, the judge called us
into his chambers. He turned to me and said,
‘I’ve wanted to meet you for years!’ and that
was the end of the story! I finally got paid.”
O nce there was a major league baseball
pitcher they called The Bird. This was
before my time, but when I was a kid I was
in the habit of memorizing old baseball sta-
tistics, and his stat line always stuck with me.
Mark Fidrych was his name: The Bird. His
rookie year, in 1976, when he was twenty-one
years old, he pitched for the Tigers and won
nineteen games. No one could touch him.
Then he got hurt and wasn’t ever the same.
Only won ten more major league games the
rest of his career. Twenty-eight years old,
retired. I used to think this was a sad story,
but I’ve changed my mind. Who wouldn’t
take comfort in one rhapsodic year?
Fontella Bass sometimes gets labeled as
a one-hit wonder. But will you take a de-
tour with me? Can I play you a song or two?
Here’s Fontella vamping her way through
“Poor Little Fool,” one of her early recordings
back in St. Louis, with producer Ike Turner’s
crackling guitar and Tina Turner on backing
vocals. Or, around forty years after “Rescue
Me,” check out Fontella in undiminished
glory on “No Ways Tired,” the title track on
her comeback gospel record—the luminous,
sanctified singer that her grandmother no
doubt imagined she would become. Or try
“Theme de Yoyo,” recorded by the Art En-
semble of Chicago in Paris as part of the
soundtrack for the French film Les Stances
à Sophie. Her voice slides and glides around
the cacophony of horns—Fontella as the wily,
outré muse for Lester Bowie’s psychedelic
jazz. Or the underrated soul album she made
when she returned to St. Louis, along with
her old collaborator Oliver Sain, released
in 1972 to little attention. The record was
called Free.
“That was my part of the movement, you
know,” she explained later. “Everything was
still going strong then. Just to be free for a
little while, you know, I’m gonna go down
by the river, sit down, try to rest my mind,
clear my mind.”
“R escue Me” has been covered dozens of
times, but none of them quite work.
Cher’s rendition can’t summon her
usual pomp and melodrama; Pat Benatar’s
sounds like filler that didn’t quite make the
Top Gun soundtrack. The Reggae Girls in
the Sixties, Guys ’n’ Dolls in the Seventies,
Dee Dee Warwick in the Nineties: Pass, pass,
pass. Melissa Manchester reimagines it as
elevator music. I don’t have an ill word to
say about Diana Ross, but I can’t say that she
adds anything to “Rescue Me” that wasn’t
already achieved in the original. The Tom
Jones version, from 1979, just makes me
deeply uncomfortable, for reasons I can’t
quite explain.
If anyone could pull it off, you might think,
it would be Linda Ronstadt, perhaps the
twentieth-century vocalist most capable of
being at once wildly malleable and utterly
distinctive. But nope. At least to my ears,
she winds up sounding like she’s doing some
throaty karaoke on her rendition, featured
on her eponymous third album.
This is the thing about the fight over credit
on “Rescue Me.” However it came to be, by
my lights, Fontella will forever own this song.
I keep thinking about that comment from
Satterfield: “she didn’t do nothin’ but sing
the song.” But that was everything!
Some time soon you will hear it, you will
hear her voice. It’s inevitable. You have
heard it a thousand times, but then, you
could say the same thing about thunder. I
hope it’s at a party. I hope you see someone
there who hasn’t been to a party in a very
long time. I hope you start dancing. That,
in any event, is my plan: I’ll be somewhere,
dancing, too.
Iask Marigold how I ought to end this story,
and she says we should listen to “Rescue
Me” on repeat and so we do.
“Here comes the fade,” I say.
“Here comes the fade,” she says.
Mmm hmm. Mmm hmm.
And then it starts again.
OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 91
92 WINTER 2021 Mid-Summer Hallucination 7, 2021, C-Print © Bryan Graf. Courtesy the artist and Tracey Morgan Gallery, NC
SLOW
TIME
Southern resonance in
Daniel Lanois’s Sling Blade score

BY

TI M
GR EI V I NG

OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 93
Daniel Lanois
was standing on
the banks of
the River Liffey
in Dublin on
a summer night
in 1984.
He was in Ireland producing The Unforgettable Fire for U2,
during the phase of his career when he was a mostly invis-
ible but vital musical presence on great albums by much
starrier artists than himself. The Liffey divides Dublin’s
north and south, and the water’s route through the ancient
city is lined with a proper brick levee as opposed to, say, the
Mississippi’s muddy riverbank. “If the Liffey spills over the
edge, it spills over the rim—as if it’s a teacup,” says Lanois.
“Sometimes it is two inches from spilling, and that’s when
I looked into it one night and I saw the blackness of the
water, and it had my reflection in it.”
In that moment came the lyrics: “Oh deep water / black
and cold like the night / I stand with arms wide open / I’ve
run a twisted line / I’m a stranger in the eyes of the maker.”
He found a searching tune for those words, sung over hymnlike “I don’t think Billy heard specific Southern tonalities” in Acadie,
chords, after he moved to New Orleans in order to soak up some of says Lanois. “He might have heard the search in that work. He’s a
the music traveling on the heavy Southern air. That’s where Lanois storyteller. He might have heard a few stories in the sounds.” The
produced the album Yellow Moon for the Neville Brothers and Oh music of Sling Blade may not be stereotypically Southern, and
Mercy for Bob Dylan, and where he set up Kingsway Studios in an old Thornton never asked Lanois to conjure the locale or write in any
mansion on Esplanade Avenue in the French Quarter. Message and style other than his own—but somehow the spirit of the place is pres-
melody coalesced into “The Maker,” a modern prayer that anchored ent within the washy, ambient, at times celestial tones that Lanois
the album Acadie, Lanois’s debut as his own singer-songwriter. specialized in as an in-demand producer during those years. And
A few years later, actor Billy Bob Thornton, who had relocated maybe the spirit of the South was in the Sling Blade score because
from his native Hot Springs, Arkansas, to the Pacific Palisades, was it had already gotten into Lanois’s bones many years before, drifting
sitting on the floor with his son Willy on his lap and listening to that all the way up to the Hamilton, Ontario, of his childhood.
album through headphones. It was 1996, and he needed a composer
for his film-directing debut. As he listened to “The Maker,” he later
recalled, he realized: this is the movie.
Based on a short one-man play and a character created and per-
formed by Thornton, Sling Blade follows an Arkansan with intel-
lectual disabilities as he reenters society after spending most of his
L anois was raised in the 1950s by the radio, which transmitted
rock & roll by the likes of Little Richard, Chuck Berry, and the
Meters. “The South moved up north at a certain point by radio, but
life in a mental hospital for carving up his mother and her lover with also by Chess Records,” says Lanois, who especially liked songs about
a kaiser blade (“some folks call it a sling blade”) in his youth. In the hard work—like Lee Dorsey’s “Working in the Coal Mine.” He even
feature-length film, Thornton’s laconic but lovable Karl befriends a wrote one himself about tobacco picking, “because that’s what we
young boy, played with preternatural grace by Lucas Black, whose had near where I grew up.” His Québécois uncles would sing sticky-
mother’s abusive boyfriend (a daringly despicable Dwight Yoakam) sweet traditional melodies that he likens to Appalachian folk tunes,
reignites the anger that drove Karl to murder in the first place. Filmed which baked into him a love for the stories that a good melody can
in the town of Benton outside Little Rock, Sling Blade drips with tell. But when he discovered the blues, he heard something unfa-
local colloquialism and personality; it’s as much a portrait of life in miliar, something profound: “We did not have that, because that’s
a small Southern town as a character study of Karl. more pain,” he says. “There’s more mourning. It’s a deeper longing.”

94 WINTER 2021 Still from Sling Blade © AF archive/Alamy


He came to appreciate that, in the South, music comes up organi-
cally from the neighborhoods—like the late Rockin’ Dopsie, a Loui-
sianan who Lanois would later collaborate with and who simply had
a genetic or maybe a God-given way with the accordion. Whereas in
Ontario, “if you wanted music, you went to music school. You’d be
in high school: ‘Well, I think I might take music.’ ‘Maybe Rita should
take piano.’ These are the kind of terms that get thrown around in
the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto. No, you don’t take it.
It’s not as if you’re taking a drug or a painkiller. You are something.”
Lanois bucked against the conservatory mentality, likening classical
orchestras to a kind of karaoke. “I’ve heard that Beethoven piece
before. ‘But there’s a new guy waving his baton!’ Let’s build a whole
new season based on some guy from Honduras with Eraserhead hair
and a baton. He’s really going to be that different this time around?”
No—Lanois wanted to invent.
Lanois, now seventy, started to make a name while running a small
recording studio with his brother in the family basement. Christian
groups and quartets who were touring Canada would pop in and
record, which instilled a lifelong love of gospel music in him. The
Lanois brothers soon upgraded to a studio that took over an entire
house, and he began tinkering with effects and atmospheres on gui-
tars and recording machines as a producer-performer on albums by
Martha and the Muffins and the children’s troubadour Raffi, making
the studio itself come alive and sing. If Phil Spector created a wall
of sound, Daniel Lanois found the sound in the walls. That put him
on Brian Eno’s map, an experimental producer to the stars, and
together they went on a cosmic journey of sound-making
that was unfairly reduced as “ambient” or “new age.” But
almost immediately U2 and other popular artists—includ-
ing Dylan, Peter Gabriel, and Emmylou Harris—sought out
Lanois for the mysterious fairy dust he could sprinkle on
their songs, both with his studio wizardry and his almost
spiritual pedal steel guitar.
His restless creative spirit has taken him all around the
world, and in the mid-’80s he felt drawn to New Orleans,
where ancient African rhythms resonated from Congo
Square and where killer Lafayette bands destroyed every
night at the Maple Leaf Bar in Uptown. Where musicians
were telling stories. “It’s hard to talk about if you haven’t
been down there,” he says. “At a certain time of the year
it’s hard to be outside because of the humidity, but the
humidity holds a lot of stories. It stops you in your tracks,
and gets you thinking about some of the more primal
concerns—you know, sexuality, food, labor, staying out
in the sun. And listening to lore, folklore.” Ranging from
the sultry rhythms emanating from the square to the
sacred songs echoing from Baptist churches on the small
but mighty Hammond organ, New Orleans had it all, and
Lanois took on some of the family traits of his new adopted
home. “When you have that kind of energy in the air, that’s
a pretty good school to go to,” he says. “It’s a class that’s
not about to get out early—no, it’s going to go all night.
For a Canadian kid, I looked for soul in music. That’s what
Quincy Jones told me. He says, ‘It doesn’t matter the genre
of music. Every music has its soul.’”
When he produced for the Nevilles, after attending
several of their shows around town and approaching them
about collaborating, Lanois created a Louisiana food-and-
family atmosphere inside an old apartment building. (“Many of the
songs were recorded live,” Charles Neville told the Miami Herald
in 1989. “Even when everybody wasn’t playing, we were all there,
sharing energy and spiritual power.”) Dylan stopped by one of their
sessions, and “I played him a few tracks,” Lanois remembers, “and
he recognized that we were hungry for something. Even if we didn’t
know exactly what it was, we were committed to what was happen-
ing at the time, and we had an eye to the future. We wanted to give
the South a whole new name.” Dylan wanted some of that same
flavorful mélange, and the producer helped breathe life back into
Dylan’s midlife career with his earthy yet ethereal touch on songs
like “Most of the Time.” “One thing about Lanois that I liked,” the
Nobel-winning poet wrote in his 2004 memoir, “is that he didn’t want
to float on the surface. He didn’t even want to swim. He wanted to
jump in and go deep. He wanted to marry a mermaid.”
E ven though some critics tired of Lanois’s touch—Rolling Stone
went from calling him “the most important record producer to
emerge in the ’80s” to writing in one review that “as usual, Lanois
overdoes the schlock atmospherics”—it was truly a Midas touch for
artists. He mined critical and commercial gold for Peter Gabriel on
the 1986 album So, and a blockbuster-selling Album of the Year, again
for U2, with The Joshua Tree in 1987. But Daniel Lanois had spent so
long discovering the soul of others that, by 1989, it was time for him
OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 95
to reveal his own. Acadie found the common ground between the
French-Canadian soil of his birth and the French-Cajun (“Acadian”)
waters of his rebirth. It’s folk music with a shimmer, like someone
singing around a campfire in the middle of heaven. The songs are
longing, equally natural and supernatural, from the wispy opening
track “Still Water” to the finale, a futuristic arrangement of “Amaz-
ing Grace” sung by Aaron Neville. “The Maker” is Lanois’s slightly
ambiguous answer to “Amazing Grace”—a classical hymn pulsing
with an addictive, even sensual bass line and trailing sonic stardust.
When Bono included the song on his “60 Songs That Saved My Life”
playlist in 2020, he addressed Lanois in an accompanying letter:
“You are a priest of music…and you will make a human sacrifice if
you have to, and you don’t care if it’s me, them or you. Still, there’s a
touch of the carnival about you…you’re not all lent, you know....You
marshal the chaos, and turn it not exactly into order…but something
beautiful. The beauty of truth, as the man said.”
Something about those ancient chords resonated in Billy Bob
Thornton, and Lanois reprised them in different forms at key mo-
ments in Sling Blade. There’s a haunting, layered vocal version
when Karl goes back to his old house and reunites with his apa-
thetic father (Robert Duvall). A dreamy, almost liquid statement
of the chords on pedal steel accompanies Karl’s visit to the grave
of the baby brother he was tasked with burying, which continues
as he stands on a bridge overlooking the Saline River. This latter
variation, which Lanois called “Omni,” hovers heavenly over Karl’s
face as the film fades to black—the avenging angel having struck
again. Those chords “tend to bring out an emotion in people,” says
Lanois. “I don’t know if it’s because we’re accustomed to hearing
them in church, where it’s a time of reassessment and kind of the
reset button on Sunday. When we hear those kinds of chords and
melodies, it suggests something ancient, something that was before
us, and that we might have a responsibility to carry something to the
next generation. Whether we believe in God or even go to church,
I think something ancient wakes up something in us, and we want
to pass it on to someone else.”
There’s a sleepy quality to the Sling Blade score, especially in
the opening track “Asylum.” It sounds like the barometric pressure
before a storm, like the air is heavy with something. Lanois says it’s
the sound of time—of all the time Karl’s been quietly living behind
institutional walls—but it also drawls and lumbers like Karl, too.
Thornton transformed himself to become this deceptively simple
character with the jutting jaw and vacant stare and grunted good
old boy slang, but if the actor and Karl have something in common,
it’s their pace. Lanois remembers his very first phone conversation
with Thornton in 1996: “I realized that he was quite a bit like me—
he spoke slowly. And there was not this discomfort about wanting
to fill every little space, so it was okay to pause a little bit and be
thoughtful, and then carry on talking.”
The first composer Thornton contacted about scoring his film had
wanted to accentuate the humor in Karl’s funny way of talking, of
being—but that was entirely wrong. “You could’ve done Winnie the
Pooh or something,” Lanois says, imitating a bouncing tuba motif,
“a little more Andy of Mayberry, sort of laughing at the lighter side
of life. But I guess Billy wanted to be a little more serious about his
message, because he’s a deep cat.” Thornton made only one request
of Lanois: full commitment. Everyone else who’d worked to make
this little gem of a movie had given it their full heart and both feet.
Lanois said no problem—that’s how he always worked.
96 WINTER 2021
By this time, he was renting an old Mexican movie theater in
Oxnard, about an hour up the coast from Los Angeles. It’s where
Dylan test drove the album Time Out of Mind and where Lanois
would produce the 1997 Willie Nelson record Teatro, the name of
the venue. “The fact that we were in a theater, making something
that would be seen in a theater in the end, had something kind of
sweet about it,” the composer says. Lanois had no interest in the
typical, streamlined approach to scoring films, and he didn’t want
to hire a bunch of workaday session musicians. Instead, he created
a merry little band—including guitarist-singer Daryl Johnson from
New Orleans and “a couple of cats from Toronto”—who all holed
up somewhere in town or the motel next door. Lanois told them:
“We’re gonna roll up our sleeves, we’re gonna live here, we’re gonna
get this thing done for Billy and keep working on it till Billy loves
it.” Reflecting on the commitment, he says, “I think Billy really ap-
preciated that we got into the depth of it. Whatever you’re hearing
in there, Southern wise, I think that’s just two people just wanting
things to be great.”
The actual technique on the prefatory “Asylum” wasn’t exactly
Southern, per se, Lanois notes. Carrying on some of the tricks he’d
developed with Eno, Lanois built guitar effects using a pedal and
feedback loop, hit RECORD, then “snowballed” and overdubbed a
guitar performance as each looping pass degenerated. The lengthy
cue plays through most of the opening sequence, from the introduc-
tion of Karl in the state mental hospital through his breathtaking
monologue about the murder that put him there. Lanois remembers
making ambient records using recordings of frogs and crickets
back in the ’80s, “so the atmosphere was always a little bit textural,
transporting, and it took you to a place where there was some con-
nection with nature. ‘Asylum’ has a little bit of that. It’s atmospheric;
it’s almost as if you’re walking along a path and that’s what you’re
hearing in the night.”
As Karl, discharged from the hospital, exits a bus to walk through
his old town, Lanois and his band put some pep in the character’s
step with a twangy groove piece led by harmonica. Outside the
laundromat, where Karl is enjoying some “french fried potaters”
from the Frostee Cream, he meets up with young Frank—and they
quickly develop an unlikely but beautiful friendship, like a contem-
porary Boo Radley and Scout. Later, at Frank’s quiet sanctuary in
the woods, Karl tells Frank about the little brother he was forced
to bury alive, and Lanois’s voice doubles with guitar and a ghostly
synthesizer in a nostalgic lament. And when Karl is baptized in the
Saline, the voice of Emmylou Harris, stacked into a one-woman
chorus, warbles the melody of “Shenandoah.” All of it is bathed in
Lanoisian reverb and atmosphere, achieved through the technological
alchemy he developed in Ontario—but in that fog are the musical
ghosts of the South.
It’s all just storytelling, says Lanois, who most recently made the
album Heavy Sun with several church folk from Louisiana on the
strength of an idea: “Let’s see if we can take gospel music to the
future.” When Willy Thornton, who was sitting on his father’s lap
on that fateful day in 1996, grew up and took a job in Toronto, Billy
Bob asked Lanois to look after him. “He came over...and he lived in
my studio for a year,” Lanois laughs. “So we’re kind of family in a
strange way. I guess Billy never really bought into too much bullshit,
and he might have appreciated that some of us Canadians think we
have a pretty good bullshitometer. So maybe he appreciated some
of that in me.”
98 WINTER 2021 Johnny Bristol, c. 1970 © Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
 Country
Boy
Gone City
A ballad of Johnny Bristol, Al Green,
and Battle Creek’s Bloody Corner

by
Rebecca
Bengal

OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 99
 THAT WAS THE NAME OF THE JOINT
It is 1976 and Dick Clark is
interviewing Johnny Bristol,
the r&b and soul singer
and Motown songwriter
and producer, on
American Bandstand.
Bristol is wearing a slate blue suit tailored to his six-foot-three or
four frame and what must rank in the top ten pairs of coolest sun-
glasses of all time, lightly shaded so that you imagine the world ap-
peared shadowed in a permanent vapor. That is, he is dressed worlds
apart from the place where we were each born, nearly forty years
apart—Morganton, North Carolina, in the Appalachian foothills, a
town that is frequently described in relation to other, larger places
nearby: a stop off I-40, surrounded by the cerulean haze of the Blue
Ridge Mountains; a town of state-run schools and institutions and,
in Bristol’s day before many of the mills were closed, a factory town
where trees got turned into furniture and cotton into lingerie and
hosiery, and where music venues and bars still existed only on the
sly. Or, as Bristol sings in a funked-out soulful, Bill Withers–esque
ballad of Morganton, “It’s just a clean-faced small place in the land
of Carolina.”
On Bandstand, Bristol is fresh off of a Grammy nomination for Best
New Artist for “Hang On In There, Baby,” his biggest solo record,
number eight on the Hot 100s. He takes a breath before attempting to
enumerate some of the greats he’s worked with as a producer (often
alongside co-producer Harvey Fuqua) and/or songs he’s written.
Among them: Stevie Wonder (“Yester-Me, Yester-You, Yesterday”),
David Ruffin (“My Whole World Ended [The Moment You Left Me]”),
Smokey Robinson and the Miracles (“We’ve Come Too Far To End It
Now”), Gladys Knight and the Pips (“Daddy Could Swear, I Declare”
and “I Don’t Want To Do Wrong”), Jerry Butler (“Memories Don’t
Leave Like People Do”), Jr. Walker & the All-Stars (“How Sweet It Is
[To Be Loved By You]”). Bristol supplied the lone male backing vocal
in the Supremes’ “Someday We’ll Be Together,” a song he originally
recorded with his erstwhile collaborator Jackey Beavers almost a
decade before Diana Ross sang it. And on and on, starting with his
Motown days and heading on into CBS Records (Boz Scaggs, Tom
Jones, Johnny Mathis). And that just gets us to the mid-Seventies.
The most fun, Bristol says, at Clark’s prodding, was working with
Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell. Of Terrell, he says, “When she
100 WINTER 2021
walked into a studio she was always up, never down, she was ready.”
With Bristol and Fuqua co-producing, Gaye and Terrell recorded
the original version of “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough,” in 1967
on Tamla Records, which became Motown. Bristol recorded them
separately, but still made their chemistry audible, palpable. The
“tick-a-tick” sound of two drumsticks striking the rim at the start
of the song is Johnny Bristol helping out the drummer.
But by 1974, he’s onstage in his own right. When Bristol writes
“Hang On In There, Baby,” he keeps it for himself—in fact, it becomes
the title song of his debut album. “[T]hat song would be a hit on
anyone,” he tells Billboard editor Adam White years later. Look it
up now, and searches for the song yield Google-automated queries
like “Did Barry White sing ‘Hang On In There, Baby’?” The slip is
forgivable, flattering—who wouldn’t want to claim that deep bass
bedroom vocal and its inevitable comparisons to White’s “Love
Theme”? But the song is all Bristol; Barry White never covered it.
(Bette Midler would, however, in 1979.)
On Bandstand, though, Dick Clark gets momentarily serious.
Clark: We talked about the good times but tell me what was
your lowest time?
Bristol: I think when I started singing in a duet and we worked
in the Bloody Corner—
Clark: Wait, the WHAT?
Bristol (unflappable in those shades, but perhaps cracking the
slightest smile): The Bloody Corner.
Clark: That was the name of the joint you worked in?
Bristol: That was the name of the joint, right. We had to throw
guys through the window, right. (He pantomimes scooping a
body, sailing it out an invisible door.)
What Bristol doesn’t have time to mention in this three-minute
interview is that the Bloody Corner (real name, the El Grotto Lounge,
in Battle Creek, Michigan) also happens to be the spot where Junior
Walker builds a following—in fact, it is where Junior Walker & the
All Stars first perform their hit “Shotgun,” allegedly inspired by
the shooting dance motions of the crowd. The crowd eats up the
song, they love it so much they’ll often make him play it more than
once in a row. Bristol, who will wind up producing Walker at Mo-
town, doesn’t get to tell Dick Clark that the El Grotto was the club
where Al Green first gigged, so young he had to wait outside in the
car until it was absolutely time to go onstage. Or how all of them,
including Jackey Beavers, the other half of Bristol’s first recording
duo, Johnny & Jackey, had grown up in little towns down South—in
Arkansas, Georgia, and North Carolina—and carried something of
those sounds up north with them in the era of the Great Migration,
unconsciously tracing ancestral paths to freedom. It just so happened
that they intersected in a rough little corner bar which was itself
begun in resistance to bigotry, tucked inside a town that was once a
major way station on the Underground Railroad, inside a state where
utopian-minded travelers had sought various refuges for more than
a century. And yet, growing up in the Eighties, as I popped my Stevie
Wonder mixtapes and my Michael and Janet Jackson cassettes into a
Kmart boombox, growing up with my mom’s Motown records, I was
never told that someone from our town had a hand in all this music.
MAPPING BATTLE CREEK
I n recent years for reasons unknown a couple local Morganton
businesses (a gym, for one) started appropriating the nick-
name “Motown.” Never mind that actual Motown, the house that
Berry Gordy built in Detroit, Michigan, is a good ten, eleven-hour
drive north.
People from Michigan map the lower peninsula of their state on
the hand. Picture the right, palm facing up. Lake Huron flows from
the middle finger and cascades over the pointer, Lake Michigan
lies flush to the pinkie, Detroit at the bottom of the thumb. From
Detroit, hang a left across and here is the small city of Battle Creek,
wedged in the lower palm, parallel to the ring finger, within the
synovial lining that connects the joints. On the hand depicted on an
acupuncture chart, Battle Creek would be located right around the
pressure point that corresponds to the small intestine. That is, it is
above the crease of the wrist, the point that connects to the heart,
which lies to the east, and south.
To anyone raised anywhere in America on breakfast cereal, the
name Battle Creek probably triggers faint recognition from earli-
est days sleepily inhaling the fine print scrolling down the boxes of
puffed grains and crisped rice. It has been the headquarters of the
Kellogg company since 1906, founded by W.K. Kellogg shortly after
his brother Thomas first developed cornflakes to serve to patients
at the Battle Creek Sanitorium, a hospital and health spa.
In the mid-1800s, Quakers and abolitionists flock to Battle Creek,
where slavery is not enforced. Arriving from New York state, Erastus
Hussey and his wife, Sarah, open a general store, publish a newspaper,
and will eventually help more than a thousand enslaved fugitives
escape to freedom. In 1857, six years after delivering her “Ain’t I a
Woman?” speech in Akron, Ohio, at the age of sixty, Sojourner Truth
joins friends and her daughter Elizabeth in Harmonia, a utopian
village near Battle Creek founded by Spiritualists—a religious move-
ment based on a belief in the possibility of communication between
the living and the dead. In 1862, after a tornado destroys much of
the village, Harmonia becomes an actual ghost town and in 1867,
Truth moves into Battle Creek proper. In 1884, Frederick Douglass
addresses the town’s Emancipation Day celebration, speaking to
an audience he fears had already forgotten the horrors of the Civil
War twenty years earlier. “Events which shook the earth, air and
sky, and plowed themselves beam deep into the very soul of the
nation have already fallen away into the dim deceptive haze of the
past,” Douglass says, and rallies the Northern crowd to rise to meet
a present threat: “You and I and all of us are bound never to rest
until the ballot box is respected in every state.”
More than a century later, when the National Underground Rail-
road Freedom Center in Cincinnati is preparing its opening, the
museum’s director, John Fleming, envisions the museum as a con-
nector of paths and stories, like the hub of a wheel, illuminating
all the routes that had been traveled in secret. “What we did was
to develop maps of the Underground Railroad, to show where
these trails emerge out of the South, going up from Maryland and
Virginia, into Pennsylvania and New York,” Fleming, now the direc-
tor emeritus, tells me from Ohio. “There were trails that led from
Arkansas, trails from Kentucky through Cleveland, and then, when
they would have gone into Battle Creek, those trails would have come
up through Cincinnati, almost following [present-day] Interstate 70,
up into Michigan.” Dr. Fleming, who also directs the newly opened
National Museum of African American Music in Nashville, is from
my hometown too. He is seven years younger than Johnny Bristol
but remembers watching Bristol’s teenage group, the Singing Yellow
Jackets, sometimes called simply the Jackets, play dances at Olive Hill
High School, an all-Black public school in officially segregated times.
LONELY AND BLUE
T heir first duet is a coincidence. It is 1956 and Jackey Beavers,
standing in the barracks shower of the Selfridge Air Force
Base outside Detroit, overhears Johnny Bristol and another Air Force
private singing as they walked by; he chimes in. “You sang?” Bristol
asks him later. “Yeah,” he answers, “I sang.”
With three others, Beavers and Bristol form a quintet—the Five
Jokers, or the High Fives, depending on who is telling the story. The
group gigs at the Gold Room on the top floor of the 20 Grand, an
upscale Detroit nightclub that catered exclusively to a Black clientele.
It’s high times for a couple of young servicemen who hailed from
little towns down South—Jackey Beavers from Cartersville, Georgia,
and Johnny Bristol from Morganton, North Carolina.
Eventually the five-piece whittles itself down to two. As Bristol
recounts years later, “We came from the deep south, didn’t drink
much and do all that stuff, so we broke off from the group and
started Johnny & Jackey.”
A brother of Duke Fakir of the Four Tops connects Bristol and
Beavers to Gwendolyn Gordy, who begins managing them. They
debut with “Lonely and Blue,” a woozy, swoony doo-wop number,
released in 1959 as an A-side 45 for Anna Records, a forerunner of
Motown, named for Gwendolyn’s sister. The year 1959 is when the
Motown dynasty begins: Gwen’s brother Berry Gordy buys the now
iconic two-story Detroit house with the bright blue front doors that
he’ll outfit with recording studios and offices and will eventually
christen Hitsville USA. Motown means nothing to the military, though,
and very much against their protests, Bristol and Beavers are given
OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 101
 Left: The Creations and Junior
Walker at the El Grotto Lounge,
left to right: Gene Mason,
Curtis Rogers, Lee Virgis, Junior
Walker, Al Green, Willie Woods.
Photo courtesy Michigan Rock
and Roll Legends

Right: News clipping, 1975.

orders to be transferred to Fort Custer, a hundred and twenty miles

from Detroit. They navigate a blizzard in Bristol’s 1951 Ford and on
their first Saturday night out on the town of Battle Creek, they trail
along with other fellow soldiers, winding up at the oval-shaped bar
of the El Grotto Lounge.
Back to the map. Between the era of the Railroad and the Great
Migration, Black people made inroads to Michigan for down-time
leisure. A hundred and fifty miles northeast of Battle Creek, between
the pinkie and ring fingers, was Idlewild, known as the Black Eden, a
year-round resort. Idlewild was a vacation refuge for Black Americans
in Jim Crow times in the spirit of American Beach outside Jackson-
ville, Florida, immortalized by Zora Neale Hurston in the Federal
Writers’ Project WPA guide she wrote about her home state in the
1930s. Idlewild was also in the spirit of Freeman’s Beach aka Bop
City near Wilmington, North Carolina, where a young Assata Shakur
worked collecting parking money in the 1950s (Bop City was owned
by Shakur’s grandparents). Part of Idlewild’s draw, too, was its array
of supper clubs for a Black clientele, places like the Purple Palace,
the Paradise/Fiesta Club, the Club Flamingo, the Fashion Flair. In the
1950s, when Idlewild became a stop on the so-called chitlin circuit
of far-flung small venues, Aretha Franklin, Sammy Davis Jr., B. B.
King, Jerry Butler, Jackie Wilson, and Brook Benton all performed
there, as the Eastern North Carolina–born writer Randall Kenan
documents in his 1999 narrative Walking on Water: Black American
Lives at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century. Still more rare in its THE EL GROTTO, AKA THE BLOODY CORNER
run (1912 to the early 1960s), individual lots and houses in Idlewild
had been sold primarily to Black vacationers, among them Dr. Daniel
Hale Williams, the first doctor to successfully perform open-heart
surgery; Madam C.J. Walker, the first Black woman millionaire; and
N onetheless, one night in the 1940s, just down the road
from Idlewild in historically abolitionist Battle Creek,
Robert Montgomery—nicknamed Snap, a Navy vet and a Kellogg’s
North Carolina author Charles Waddell Chestnutt, the first Black worker, a husband and father—leaves a local bar to the sound of
writer to publish short fiction in The Atlantic. breaking glass as the bartender buses the spot where Montgomery
Many lots were bought sight unseen. In 1921, W.E.B. DuBois, who had been seated. Better to destroy a glass touched by a Black man
purchased several himself, wrote in the NAACP magazine The Crisis than to wash it and pour a drink in it for a white patron. That does
that it was “the beautifulest stretch I have seen for twenty years; it for Snap. Not long after this incident, he and his wife, Helen, both
and then to that add fellowship.” Much like its counterparts, when quit their jobs. In 1949, they open their own spot, the Corner, at the
the passage of the Civil Rights Act made it safer to explore other intersection of Kendall and South Hamblin Streets, a place that has
destinations, people came to Idlewild less frequently. When Kenan already been through a few past lives. When an adjacent pool hall
visited in the 1990s, the Flamingo Bar was the only one of the original shuts down, they acquire that too and, inspired by a bar they visit
supper clubs still standing. He met a woman who reminisced about on a trip to California, change the name to the El Grotto Lounge.
“how wonderful it had been to be in a town where after you got off (The origin story of Johnny & Jackey and of the bar is told at length
Route 10, all you saw was black faces. It was like coming to another in Here I Stand: One City’s Musical History, a 2003 book by Sonya
world, a black country.” and Sean Hollins, and in the Battle Creek Enquirer archives.) The El

102 WINTER 2021

Grotto is a neighborhood bar—beer, wine, records on the jukebox,
fights on the regular, and sometimes, guns drawn. Miss Helen, as
patrons call her, hopefully arranges flowers in a giant planter near
the entrance. It’s no Gold Room at the 20 Grand, it’s no Paradise
Room or Purple Palace at Idlewild, but for Bristol and Beavers, a
couple of soldiers who can’t take the time off to tour around the
country, it’s something.
When Johnny & Jackey convince Miss Helen to let them perform,
they become the first live act at the El Grotto, and their performances
begin filling up the 300-capacity club, paving the way for a number
of iconic acts in their nascent years: for Kansas-born Wade Flemons,
then the star of a doo-wop group called the Shifters, before he goes
on to become one-third of Earth, Wind & Fire; for the girl group
the Velvelettes, who will eventually record with Bristol at Motown;
for Alabama-raised comedian Jimmy Lynch, who records his live
album Funky Tramp at the El Grotto; for the Royaliers; for burlesque
shows, live snakes, and, at least once, for an audience that includes
Muhammad Ali. Johnny & Jackey’s pay for a gig at the El Grotto
($25) may be equal to a week of kitchen patrol on the base, but it
isn’t much for two men who are each newly married and starting
families (in 1984, Bristol’s first wife, Maude Bristol Perry, would
become the first woman mayor of Battle Creek, where she still lives
and where a street was named for her in May 2021). When Johnny
& Jackey do manage to play out of town they have to stick within
driving range of the base. Bristol recalls to Adam White how they’d
pack up in Jackey’s car and stop in towns in Indiana, Michigan, and
Ohio “just singing in different places in our little red bowties. If you
saw a picture, you’d die.”
Listening to Johnny & Jackey’s original version of “Someday We’ll
Be Together,” a rare 45 on Harvey Fuqua’s Tri-Phi label is extra
bittersweet. It’s released in 1961, a few years before they part ways
around 1963. Beavers has a baby on the way; he’s in danger of being
fired if he misses another shift at his new hospital job. When Johnny
& Jackey are invited to play in Beavers’s home state, at the Royal
Peach in Atlanta, Beavers regretfully declines. “I was miserable,
and Johnny was too,” he remembers in Here I Stand. Bristol’s first
marriage is over or close to; he heads to Detroit, where the Motown
family is growing to include both Tri-Phi and Anna Records and
others, where marriages bloom out of work (Fuqua is wed to Gwen
Gordy, and Bristol will marry her sister Iris) and where he strikes
up a beautiful and longtime producing partnership with Fuqua.
In 1969, at Berry Gordy’s urging, “Someday We’ll Be Together” is
given to Diana Ross for her final Supremes album—the intimation
being that maybe, one day, Ross will reunite with bandmates Mary
Wilson and Cindy Birdsong, who don’t appear on the recording,
which Bristol renders as gorgeously lush and symphonic. Embed-
ded deep within are his own ad-libs, and the steady, captivating riff
that is the heart of the Johnny & Jackey original. Theirs hearkens
back to a sound hailing from farther South than each of them—a
sweetly intimate stripped-down tune whose rhythm feels in kinship
with early Jamaican ska, whose melody contains a yearning for the
someday that never will come.
HANG ON IN THERE, BABY
“B lack music is fugitive music,” Harmony Holiday has
written in this magazine. “It often occupies the sound
and space of escape, of running away, denying, rejecting, moving
on, walking by.”
Al Green, born Albert Leornes Greene in St. Francis County, Ar-
kansas, not far from the township of Greasy Corner, is raised first
in the nearby and since-gone town of Jacknash, where his father
Robert works as a sharecropper, drinks on Saturday nights, and
on Sundays sings gospel. It is 1955 when Robert opens an envelope
and discovers that the total earnings for an entire year of hard labor
amount to just $800. How many other migration stories begin like
this one? He and his wife wake the kids in the middle of the night
and pack everything that will fit into their GMC truck, strapping
a mattress on top, none of the kids able to envision quite where
they are going as they fit themselves where they can, among and
underneath the family’s hastily grabbed possessions. Robert Greene
follows more recent paths too—Al’s older brother had already left
Arkansas for Grand Rapids, Michigan, and sent word that there
were jobs to be found.
The Greenes might have driven past Blytheville, the birthplace of
Autry DeWalt Mixon Jr. née Junior Walker, whose own family will
move up to South Bend, Indiana, and whose lightning performances
Al will come to know in about a decade when they share five-sets-a-
night gigs at the El Grotto. The family’s middle-of-the-night journey
is an unconscious repeat of the nocturnal paths traveled by ancestors
in the days of the Underground Railroad. They reclaim the routes
Candacy Taylor charts in The Overground Railroad, her history of
the Green Book travel guides. They travel the roads taken by six
million others who flee the South in the six decades of the Great
Migration that Isabel Wilkerson chronicles in The Warmth of Other
Suns. Some of the maps of those routes resemble weather maps,
wind currents, or the reverse of migratory birds, traveling against
the season toward the promise of a brighter one.
In Idlewild, Michigan, Calvin Cormier, one-half of a local couple
Randall Kenan meets, describes seeing salmon swim for the first
time. “And you ought to see them when they run up. The river is
going down, they’re coming up, they’re swimming up and you’ll see
them, swimming just to get up....I mean, they’re strong fish, and they
have to fight the currents and everything. Just to get up here.” Before
Michigan, the Cormiers lived in Pasadena, but Calvin was raised in
Texas City, Texas. “I’d never heard of Idlewild.”
Whatever Al Green’s father is driving toward must feel like myth
too, bound in faith. Think of the way the artist Dawoud Bey’s Night
Coming Tenderly, Black photographs imagine nocturnal landscapes
along the Underground Railroad as they would have been seen
by those fleeing enslavement, traveling under the protection of
blackness. The series of pictures references a dream—“While night
comes on gently, / Dark like me— / That is my dream!”—a Langston
Hughes verse.
Think of the way stories spread, how they are passed along and
embellished to convince those who must travel on imagination and
belief—chasing the California gold rush, crops in the Depression,
the shelter of a city for anyone fleeing repression. I’m from Johnny
Bristol’s hometown, but my grandparents on both sides of the family
grew up farming for a living. One grandfather, determined to escape
cotton picking, hopped trains to Texas, a place he could hardly en-
vision, following the rumor of easier crops—and had to hitchhike
back home when he discovered he’d mistimed their harvest. When
I’d try to explain New York City to my paternal grandmother, a
farmer and a chicken factory worker, I’d see her eyes cloud a little.
OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 103
I wish I’d asked her then what she pictured, if in her mind when I all alone, but my mind’s goin’ back to Morganton...North Carolina.”
left, I just dissolved altogether. On the phone she’d want to know When he sings “North Carolina” in that refrain, he emphasizes the
the things she could hold on to: what the weather was like, what I genuine accent of the place; there’s a palpable put-on twang in the
was cooking, when I was coming home. word “boy” in “A country boy gone city, blinded by its neon signs.”
“What’s much harder to find in a book is the experience of leaving To commemorate Johnny Bristol Day, the lyrics to “Morganton” are
everything behind,” Green remembers in Take Me to the River, his printed in the local newspaper like a poem.
2000 autobiography. He was about nine years old when the fam- His honorary banquet, held at a neighborhood recreation center, is
ily migrated north and didn’t much care for the reality of Grand sold out in advance to an audience of 450—“everybody in Morganton
Rapids (an hour and change north of Battle Creek). “As far as I was was there that could get there,” says Brenda Brewer, who was on the
concerned, Michigan might just as well have been the dark side of alumni committee that helped organize Johnny Bristol Day. She still
the moon...it sure was cold enough to be. I couldn’t have imagined keeps her program among her Johnny Bristol LPs. “Whenever ‘Hang
a place more distant and different from the warm nights and wide- On In There, Baby’ comes on you wanna turn it up,” she tells me on
open fields of my home.” the phone. “When my husband was still living, we’d put it on and you
Eventually Al joins the school choir, and tunes in to WCHB, the know, get to dancing around the kitchen! It makes you smile, makes
Detroit station that played Nat King Cole, Little Richard, Chuck you feel good, makes you remember.” Bristol’s banquet is sandwiched
Berry, and a song by a distant cousin of his from West Memphis, into days of touring local schools and institutions, giving interviews,
Arkansas—Herman, better known as Junior Parker, who had a a radio show. There are speeches, a custom-designed cake. Just
hit with “Mystery Train”: “It before he receives the keys to
sent shivers down my spine,” the city, a pre-taped personal
Green writes, “from the very congratulatory greeting from
first notes.”
Robert Greene reestablishes The El Grotto is a Smokey Robinson plays for the
hometown crowd.
the family gospel choir, and At Olive Hill, the all-Black
they tour as far away as Cana- school from which he gradu-
da and New York City, singing
“Mary Don’t You Weep” and
neighborhood bar—beer, ated, Bristol was a star football
player and a tenor in the glee
“How I Got Over.” Meanwhile club (his voice deepened later)
Al hums along to Stevie Won-
der and Little Eva in secret,
wine, records on the encouraged by his teacher Ef-
fie Williams. At Slades Chapel
but when his father catches he sang in the choir, but he
him listening to Jackie Wil-
son’s “A Woman, A Lover, A
jukebox, fights on the never learned to read music.
“My parents never imagined
Friend,” he breaks the record anything for us but college,”
and the player. Al runs away
from home, determined to regular, and sometimes, John Fleming tells me. “If
you didn’t go to college, you
go out and buy the record wanted to get out somehow,”
again. (Once, asked about says Calvin Johnson, husband
her father’s influences, John-
ny Bristol’s youngest daugh-
guns drawn. of Bristol’s only sister, Barbara.
Like Bristol, Johnson enlisted
ter Karla Gordy Bristol says, in the service: when he was
“I think everyone back then in Germany, Barbara, called
was influenced by Jackie Wilson.”) With two friends, Green forms Nudie, who passed away this Easter 2021, went to live for a while
a band, Al Green & the Creations, and by late fall of 1966, they’re with Johnny’s family in Michigan. “If you didn’t get out, you tried
putting up handbills for a show at the El Grotto Lounge in nearby to get on at the hosiery mill or the furniture factory.” That I knew
Battle Creek—“a smoky dive on the outskirts of town.” It won’t be implicitly. My own parents were almost the opposite—though my
long before Al Green & the Creations have a hit on their hands with father, Deaf from birth, had been a boarding student at the North
“Back Up Train,” and bookings at the Apollo, and it won’t be long Carolina School for the Deaf in Morganton, both he and my mother
before Al meets his future Hi Records producer Willie Mitchell on a were from elsewhere in the state and had moved to town to teach
shared bill in Midland, Texas, a meeting that paves the way for his and work at NCSD. Growing up, I never imagined staying. In “Mor-
return South to Memphis. ganton, North Carolina,” Bristol sings of his father, “we didn’t want
for nothing, though his pay was small as hell.” In an interview in the
local News Herald, Bristol painted a starker vision of his prospects:
MIND’S GOING BACK TO THE PLACE WHERE I WAS BORN “If I’d stayed here, I’d probably be working down at Drexel Furniture,
trying to make ends meet. That is, if I wasn’t in jail.”

B ristol is thirty-six years old, a father of three, when he returns

to North Carolina for Johnny Bristol Day. He’s just released a
second album, Feeling the Magic (1975), which includes an ode to his
hometown, written in a hotel in New York City: “I’m just sittin’ here
Soon after he began working for Motown, Bristol married Iris
Gordy, Berry’s niece, with whom he had another daughter, Karla,
who has publicly pointed out that her father was one of the first Black
musicians to take control of his catalog. Bushka Records blends the

104 WINTER 2021

names of his three children—Johnny Jr., called Butch, Shauna, and
Karla. Home for Johnny Bristol Day, Bristol buys the house he grew
up in, renting it out to one of his brothers so it will stay in the family.
Maybe he’ll retire in Morganton one day, he tells a local reporter.
Calvin Johnson goes along with his brother-in-law to help him pick
out a new car. “A 1975 red Cadillac,” Johnson remembers. It’s a Coupe
de Ville, he tells me, with a matching interior and white seats. When
he lived in Michigan, Bristol used to make the ten, eleven-hour drive
between Battle Creek or Detroit and North Carolina. Now he goes
all the way back home to buy a car made in or near Motor City. This
time he’ll drive it all the way back to Los Angeles. He pays in cash.
Nearly twenty years have passed since Bristol graduated, went
downtown and enlisted in the Air Force—a Rip Van Winkle space
of time that contains the entire 1960s. He visits, returns for family
reunions, but to reporters he calls his May 1975 trip his first real public
homecoming. “I remember the kid who grew up here under heavy
prejudice, and the two drink-
ing fountains in town, one for
whites and one for blacks,”
Bristol says in one interview
published in the local paper.
“The kid who always had to go
through the back door.”
When Bristol was playing
gigs at the Bloody Corner,
civil rights sit-ins had reached
Burke County, North Caroli-
na. It was after Greensboro,
John Fleming remembers. The
transformational Woolworth’s
sit-ins by students from SNCC
and NC A&T University con-
tinued from February to July;
and sometime after, SNCC
organizers fanned out in cit-
ies and towns throughout the
state to educate and organize.
“Some of them came to Olive
Hill and they gave us some
training in nonviolent action,”
Fleming says from Ohio, where
he and his wife have lived for
forty-one years. “And I remember distinctly when we were talking
about how to respond, and one guy said, Well, he wasn’t going to
let anybody hit him or spit on him or pull anything on him. And so
they told him that he could not participate, if that was going to be
his response. He had to be ready to take whatever came.”
On the day of, Fleming recalls, “about a dozen of us walked to
the Woolworth’s on West Union Street and sat down at the coun-
ter.” Fleming was a junior at Olive Hill and president of the student
council. “I’m still surprised we were able to keep it a secret,” he said.
“We decided we would just quietly sit there and wait to be served
or denied service.” After five days, he said, city officials asked them
for a moratorium, while they held meetings. “And we were reluctant
to do that, because we thought we had developed some momentum
and we were prepared for sort of a lengthy struggle. But we did give
them the weekend. Within that week, they said everything would
be integrated.”
This is the first I’ve ever heard of a 1960s sit-in in my own home-
town—and I sit in Brooklyn stunned at both their bravery and the
dedication and organization of SNCC, to go out and empower all
these little places. “You know, there might have been an article writ-
ten once things were integrated, but if I remember correctly—and I
used to sell papers for the News Herald—that week that the sit-ins
occurred, I think there was a blackout of news about them. I think
they were keeping everything as quiet as possible,” Fleming says.
When I call Fleming’s classmate Brenda Brewer again, she concurs.
“I wasn’t part of the group that was designated to take a seat, but
there was a bigger group of us who walked downtown with them.”
She doesn’t remember any threat in the streets, “but the folks that
sat down inside, I don’t know. I believe there may have been some
words or gestures that were exchanged, but I know they didn’t get
service.” She also doesn’t recall being scared, or nervous that day:
“All I remember was being young and foolish and fearless.”
A 1960 editorial pub-
lished in the News Herald
after Greensboro asserted,
bewilderingly, that local sit-
ins could lead to “a blot on
Morganton’s record and set
back the cause of improved
race relations by more than
fifty years.” This was published
four years before the forced
integration of local schools
and fifteen years before Bris-
tol’s homecoming.
And still. I mention to Cal-
vin Johnson something else
Brenda Brewer tells me she
recollected hearing—how dur-
ing that visit Johnny Bristol
had allegedly been stopped by
the Morganton police, in the
parking lot of Roses discount
store. “Yes, that did happen,”
Johnson says. “Johnny Bris-
tol got pulled over on Johnny
Bristol Day. He was on his way
to get the keys to the city when
they stopped him in that red Cadillac for no other reason than being
a black man driving it. On his way to get the keys to the city. I think
they did issue him an apology.”
Johnny Bristol drives his red Cadillac back to Los Angeles, where
through the late ’70s and ’80s he continues to make music—his own,
Bristol’s Crème, Strangers, and Free to Be Me, and singles released
around the world in the ’90s. By 2004, he’s back in the Battle Creek
area, at work on a still unreleased gospel album when he dies sud-
denly at home, of an apparent seizure. “My wife was always on him
to go to the doctor and get himself checked up,” Calvin Johnson
says. “Johnny always said, if it works, don’t fix it.”
Bristol does not remarry after his second divorce, but if online
forums are to be trusted, he is certainly not alone near the end of
his life. On the site Blog of Death a commenter identifying herself
as Marilyn scripts a movie scene of a memory, when (her original
in all caps) “you jumped out of your Land Rover at the traffic light.
OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 105
Walked back to my car with an expression on your face that surely
said ‘You are all that matter right here and now,’ placed the most
passionate kiss on my lips. Then strutted back to your truck just in
time for the light to change.”
Another poster, Connie, who writes of a sixteen-and-a-half-year
relationship with Bristol, magnanimously acknowledges “all those
other women who were blessed with [his love] as I was and still am...
He made the women he loved feel special.” Mixed in with memories
by Marilyn and Connie and barbs from a defensive “unknown” are
testimonials from a former lawn mower and aspiring musician for
whom Bristol once gave a preview of his never-released gospel album.
Another arrives from producer Lamar Thomas who wrote a song
for that same final, unfinished album, and who has since died. There
are tributes from the faraway fans who grew up in homes “where
[M]otown was always on the lips of many of my aunts,” the fans who
cite his “passionate and uncommonly endearing country twang style
of singing.” They call out the songs by name: “You and I.” “Love No
Longer Has a Hold on Me.” “Do It To My Mind.” “Memories Don’t
Leave Like People Do.” They write, “Brother Johnny, bless me with
your spirit!” They are joined by Fawn: “Johnny was a wonderful man,
genuine, very kind, sincere, and compassionate about everything
and everyone. He had no ego or conceit like Marvin Gaye and David
Ruffin... The time I spent with him will always bring a smile and
bliss whenever I’m feeling low. Johnny always knew how to make a
woman feel beautiful by using his heart and mind and not just with
what’s between his legs.” Daughter Karla Gordy Bristol, who is now
a talk show host in Beverly Hills, responds to the thread three years
later, diplomatically and with appreciation: “He gave a lot of love,
and could have taught classes on how to treat a lady.”
I think about how Dick Clark asked Johnny Bristol, “Are you a
romantic individual?” to which Bristol intoned, in that deep steady
bass, “I believe in love...”
TIRED OF BEING ALONE
I t is the winter of 1969 and Al Green is back in rural Michigan
after a gig in Detroit. He pulls into a motel to try to catch
some sleep on the drive back to Memphis. The very word Michigan
“can still make me shudder,” he recalls in 2000, but today he wakes
before dawn, looks out across the highway at a landscape of frozen
fields slowly taking shape as the sky lightens. “The morning was
so pure, so beautiful that I wanted it to never end,” he writes. “But
even as the thought came to me I realized that, with no one to share
it sooner or later I’d grow tired of being alone, tired of being on my
own.” And then he reaches for motel pad and paper and begins to
write the lyrics to his first true hit song.
I think about convergences and overlapping maps, how two musi-
cians born in the rural South ended up singing their first songs on
the same bloody corner in Michigan, how they both found a way to
transform the hollow, displaced feelings of Northern loneliness and
homesickness into seduction and romance. When Bristol performs
on Soul Train from his album Bristol’s Crème, his friend Smokey
Robinson jokes to Don Cornelius that the song “You Turned Me On
To Love” should be twenty-five minutes long. It’s music, Robinson
emphasizes, to make love by.
The first time I hear “Morganton, North Carolina” I too am sitting
far from home in the near equivalent of a hotel room in New York
106 WINTER 2021
City, a very small apartment in Brooklyn, and it’s hard to believe
anyone wrote a song about our town, period. We’re too far west to
merit a specific small town shoutout in Petey Pablo’s “Raise Up,” so
even though I claimed that song too back in 2001, the experience
of hearing Bristol’s is part odd pride, part a little amazement. I’d
never heard anyone romance our town, at least not anyone whom
I felt I could trust, someone who could paint it in all its colors, and
still underline the need to leave it.
YES WE WILL, YES WE WILL
G ranted I grow up with one parent who doesn’t hear music,
and both parents working extra jobs while raising us. So I
don’t recall when I consciously become aware of Johnny Bristol. I
simply absorb the music. Who doesn’t, after all, know the Temp-
tations, the Four Tops, the Supremes? Maybe my sister and I see
reruns of the jubilance of the Soul Train line dancing to “Love No
Longer Has a Hold On Me” (1981). From the blacktop behind our
elementary school where we shoot hoops and play foursquare and
jump rope and slap down cardboard, we can catch sight of the rec
center where Bristol’s sold-out banquet was held, but we aren’t
told that story. When we jealously watch the older sixth-grade kids
choreograph a dance to “Beat It” for the end-of-year music show,
none of our teachers tell us that a man from our hometown produced
some of Michael Jackson’s songs, and Jermaine’s and Janet’s. That
some of the kids in our school are related to Johnny Bristol, some
go to his church, some are friends of his family, some live right by
Mountain View Rec.
In fourth grade in North Carolina public school—at least then—
you learn state history. The rivers named for peoples who were
removed, the Lost Colony, the first English child born in the newly
settled colonies, no kidding. You learn the mountains, the Pied-
mont, the coastal plain; you commit to memory the names of the
one hundred counties, the names of the places where tobacco and
peanuts come from. You do not hear about your classmates’ uncles
and grandparents’ sit-ins that happened in your own town, about
your classmates’ aunts and grandmothers who fought in the ’60s to
desegregate the other rec center downtown where now you all go
roller skating every Thursday. You memorize the map, but you are
not shown then how its roads connect to the ones you can imagine
beyond, the ones you hear on the radio, see on MTV.
The building that once housed the El Grotto Lounge in Battle
Creek was demolished in the summer of 2019. In Morganton,
Johnny Bristol is buried in breezy, oak-dotted Olive Hill cemetery
next to a kudzu ravine and a short distance from the railroad
tracks, not far from the site of the school where he sang with his
earliest group. His stone is steps from Etta Baker’s, the legendary
Piedmont blues guitarist who lived most of her life in Morganton
and played faithfully on her porch in relative obscurity for decades
until her belated rediscovery. Etta’s legacy was keeping alive the
ancient sounds of vanished worlds, chords that she’d learned from
her father and made her own—a time traveler. Johnny Bristol’s
musical legacy, I think, is wrapped up in escaping this place and
taking it somewhere else, embedding it in all those soul and r&b
records, in loving it and leaving and coming back, driving away
in that brand-new Cadillac, charting and tracing all those paths
again and again.
 A 23-track double CD* featuring 60 North Carolina musicians, including:
MITCH E A S T ER ; PE T ER HOL S A PPL E ; DON DIXON ; CAIT LIN CA RY ; RICK MIL L ER A ND M A RY HUFF
of SOU T HERN CULT URE ON T HE SK IDS ; and LIBBY RODENBOUGH of MIP SO .
*10-track vinyl LP and a limited-edition 12-inch EP with four new tracks also available.

All proceeds go to BE GOOD TO YOURSELF:

MENTAL HEALTH FOR NORTH CAROLINA MUSICIANS ,

ARTIST: WOODIE LONG, SANTA ROSA BEACH, FL

a non-profit project to help uninsured
musicians seeking treatment for mental-
health issues and/or addiction.

Available OCT. 1
BGOOD2YOURSELF.ORG

“ The idea that musicians can weather the storm – that’s fantasy.
I’m happy that proceeds from this recording will help folks.
DON DIXON, SOL O A R TIS T, PRODUCER OF R.E.M., T HE SMIT HEREENS, M A RSH A L L CRENSH AW A ND M A N Y MORE

North Carolina boasts one of the best ongoing music legacies in the country.
Few albums bring past and present together better than ‘Be Good to Yourself,’ a multi-generational
summit with well-known N.C. stars and some who will be. It’s for a great cause, too.
PA RK E PU T ERBAUGH, FORMER SENIOR EDIT OR AT ROL LING S T ONE A ND AU T HOR OF PHISH : THE BIOGRAPHY

This is for a very, very good cause. It’s always been hard for musicians.
That needs to be fixed.
RICK MILLER, SOUTHERN CULTURE ON THE SKIDS

B G O O D 2 Y O U R S E L F. O R G
108
 TOWARD THE SUN

JAZZ AND SOUL BLOOM

U P S O U T H AT M I D C E N T U R Y
PHOTOGRAPHS BY

Kwame Brathwaite
Opposite page: Stevie Wonder headlines Human Kindness Day at the National Mall, Washington,
D.C., 1975. Above: Self-portrait, African Jazz-Art Society & Studios (AJASS), Harlem, c. 1964. 109
 Quincy Jones, c. 1972.

Naturally ’68 photo

shoot, featuring
Grandassa Models at the
Apollo Theater, Harlem.

110
111
112
Sikolo Brathwaite wearing headpiece
designed by Carolee Prince, c. 1968.

Nomsa Brath on the cover of Lou Donaldson, The Natural Soul, 1962.
Opposite page: Max Roach in Harlem, c. 1962.

OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 113
114
The Jackson brothers aboard a boat from Gorée Island, Senegal, c. 1974.
Opposite page: Sister Sledge at Brathwaite’s studio, c. 1978.

115
 Nina Simone on stage during a concert at the
Beacon Theater in New York City, c. 1973.
Opposite page: Marvin Gaye, c. 1974.

116
117
118 Grandassa Models at Marcus Garvey Day Parade, Harlem, c. 1965.
 KEEPER OF THE IMAGES BY JASMINE SANDERS
1968 image taken by the photographer
Kwame Brathwaite features his wife
Sikolo, captured in profile against an
apricot background. At a glance, she
bears resemblance to Cicely Tyson, who
had appeared on stage, freshly mown
and undeniable, in Jean Genet’s 1961
stage production of The Blacks. Resting
atop Sikolo’s own close-cut natural is a
bright headpiece fashioned by Carolee
Prince and worn with commingled grandeur and airiness which
suggests that the cascade of pink, white, and red beading might
have sprung from her very head. The side view showily centers
those features historically reviled—her rounded nostrils, the
full fullness of her mouth, her deep brown skin—paired with
the era’s cosmetic vogues. Thin, crescent brows, eyeliner wings
sharp. The portrait is tight but not claustrophobic, forsaking
the cold, invading lens of the ethnographer, photojournalist,
or policeman, with their queasy intentions and methods, for
an alternative mode of intimacy. This ability to impart unto the
viewer a deeper, more profound sense of knowing figures both
anonymous and globally renowned eventually earned Brathwaite
the unofficial title “Keeper of the Images.” When black was finally
decreed beautiful, Brathwaite not only amplified the notion, but
offered attesting pictorial evidence.
According to his son and archivist, Kwame Jr., the elder
Brathwaite’s oeuvre is goliath beyond numeration, comprising
thousands of images chronicling decades of black social life.
Brathwaite began photo taking in the 1950s, often inside jazz
clubs like the Bronx’s Club 845, where his initial involvement
consisted of drawing talent and organizing shows. Hasselblad
camera in hand, he soon began recording the likes of Dizzy Gil-
lespie, Duke Ellington, Thelonious Monk, and Sarah Vaughan,
the jazzmen and -women who engineered the era’s sonics just as
Brathwaite did visually. The aesthetics of jazz—its exploratory
improvisation and texturality—thrum through his work. His snap
of Miles Davis is at a measured, intuitive distance, in mercurial
black and white. Davis’s eyes are sealed shut as the bassist Paul
Chambers looks on, brows lurched upward in reverent alertness,
the synergic relation between bassist and trumpeter akin to that
which exists between photographer and subject, and subject and
viewer. This interplay is also redolent of black Christian traditions
of testimony and worship: Discernable in Marvin Gaye’s uprisen
arms and his contorted, dewy face, and in the angle of Nina
Simone’s sharply arched leg, the halo of stage light just missing
her jeweled head, is the posture of a testifier. Stevie Wonder,
in a camel-colored dashiki at the zenith of his classics period,
tosses his head toward heaven, the similarly brown audience
unidentifiable but appropriately enthralled congregants. The
mix of semi-posed shots and candids calls to mind the stylized
photo galleries of black homes, a mix of altar and interior decor.
All photos courtesy the Kwame Brathwaite Archive. Brathwaite’s work is on view through January 16 at the Detroit Institute of Arts.
Brathwaite’s parents were Barbadian immigrants, among the
hundreds of thousands of Afro-Caribbean migrants to the U.S.
in the twentieth century—largely concentrated in the North-
east—who reconfigured the cultures, politics, and labor forces
of global metropolises. His parents settled in what Brathwaite
refers to as “the People’s Republic of Brooklyn.” When he was
an adolescent, the burgeoning influences of Garveyism, black
nationalism, and other liberationist ideologies enlivened the air
of Brathwaite’s native Brooklyn, suffusing him with the impera-
tives of the nascent black revolution and its associative imagery.
In 1955, he encountered Emmett Till’s mangled body, published
in Jet magazine, casket open at Till’s mother’s request. This
further solidified Brathwaite’s racial consciousness as well as
his budding artistic ethos. His entire output can be understood
as a response to the photo of the massacred boy and its varied,
innumerable corollaries. Lynchings, covered in newspapers and
eternalized via postcard aide-mémoire, reminded the black
populace of their lowly station below the Mason-Dixon. Later,
television footage of police savagery, fire hoses, and lunging
canines in Northern cities asserted that theirs was a violence
without refuge. Brathwaite was attempting to leverage a sort of
countering visual lexicon, replicating the political utility of the
aforementioned, brutal imagery, but toward a different end. He
and his brother founded the African Jazz-Art Society & Studios
(AJASS), an arts coalition focused on Pan-African teachings, in
Manhattan one year later. A troupe of black women who came to
be known as the Grandassa Models, Sikolo among its participants,
showcased the splendor of afro-textured hair, darker skin, and
West African–inspired dress.
Which isn’t to imply that it was a movement without critique
or outright refutation of its particular romances and dignified
ethno-chauvinisms. Though the metrics had changed, the de-
mands and standards of beauty, especially pertaining to black
women, remained stringent and entrenched: The body curvy
but by no means fat, the attire denoting vague relations to
some distant, Nubian aristocracy, the perfectly spherical ’fro.
Michele Wallace, writing of the era’s circumscriptions: “On the
cultural level everything had to be rehauled. Black poems, plays,
paintings, novels, hairstyles, and apparel were springing up like
weeds in Central Park. Brothers, with softly beating drums in
the background, were talking about beautiful black Queens of
the Nile and beautiful full lips and black skin and big asses.”
Yet the prettiness and allure of the images remain. The Brath-
waite photos I find most endearing are those of black collectivity
and sociality, the multitudinous affects and postures within the
cityscape, which would only be subjected to increasing censure
in the decades to come. These showcase most effectively Brath-
waite’s lofty, dignifying endeavor, his attempt to utilize his lens,
as the Bajan poet and scholar Kamau Brathwaite wrote of Paule
Marshall: “...not to say ‘it is so,’ but to say, as the conjuror says,
this is how it could/should be.”
119
120
121
The cover for
the 1973 album
Nutbush City Limits
offers a visual
representation of
the Southern roots
and the movement
to other parts of
the country that
are crucial to the
biographies of Ike
and Tina Turner
and numerous other
African Americans.
Both the front and back feature a four-color, cartoonlike illustra-
tion of the Tennessee countryside with photos of Tina (without
Ike) superimposed into the scene. On the front, the sun sets behind
Tennessee mountains dotted with pine trees; to one side is a wooden
house with smoke rising out of its chimney and, across the way, a
small wooden outhouse. A yellow traffic sign that reads ENTERING
NUTBUSH CITY LIMITS sits in the foreground to the right of a barefoot
Tina Turner in a long purple cotton-print dress, her eyes shut and
teeth bared in a grimace as she puts her foot up against the front
grille of a 1950s-era Chevrolet pickup truck. The back cover shows
a similar mountainous background, but the sign in the foreground
now reads LEAVING NUTBUSH CITY LIMITS. Tina’s attire and vehicle
I
have also changed. She wears a fur coat, a long black skirt, and
high-heeled black pumps. She is sitting, with her legs crossed, on
a late-model silver Rolls Royce, one hand resting on the gleaming
hood and her face turned to the camera. The picture of elegance, she
wears an expression of subdued satisfaction. The car’s blue-and-gold
California license plate is personalized with BOLIC, the name of the
studio that Ike built in Inglewood, California, and the place where
they recorded the album. It is an image of the kind of arrival that
African American migrants leaving the South might have dreamed
of achieving, heading out west to Los Angeles where the Turners put
down roots in the early 1960s. Between the truck and the Rolls, Tina
and Ike met and forged their professional and personal partnership
in the Up South metropolis of St. Louis, or more specifically, East
St. Louis, Illinois, across the Mississippi River. The album’s familiar
opening title track, which reached number eleven on Billboard’s r&b
122 WINTER 2021
chart and rose to number twenty-two on the magazine’s pop chart,
kicks off with a concise sketch of Tina’s Down South hometown: “A
church house, gin house / A school house, outhouse / On Highway
Number Nineteen…” Closing side two, the less known “Club Man-
hattan” travels upsouth to East St. Louis and slows things down as
it recalls the nightlife scene that sustained Ike’s band, the Kings of
Rhythm, and launched Tina’s career in the 1950s. The two songs are
companion pieces—featuring the same roadhouse-style guitar and
soul horn arrangement—and the lyrics Tina wrote for them draw
on her memories of key places of her youth and celebrate the com-
munities found in them.
“Club Manhattan” describes one of the African American cultural
spaces in which rhythm and blues and its descendent rock & roll
were created. The club was part of the chitlin circuit, the network of
venues that ranged from legitimate theaters like the Apollo to small
clubs to makeshift stages in barns and Elks clubs where African
American musicians, singers, dancers, and comedians performed
for African American audiences. The goings-on at the Club Manhat-
tan were rooted in the African American Southern traditions that
Black migrants carried with them when they moved from the South
to towns and cities in other parts of the United States. The song is
a mid-tempo track whose twanging guitar rhythms and backing
horns evoke late nights at a roadhouse, as Tina describes an evening
at “the swinging little club.” There were “women dressed in satin,”
people “playing craps in the back,” someone “frying fish up in the
front,” and “a whole lot of romping foot stomping” inspired by “the
man on the stand, children…Ike Turner and the Kings of Rhythm.”
She even provides driving directions: just go “Over across the Eads
Bridge, / By East St. Louis, / Six blocks down Broadway.” Take that
ride across the Mississippi River and, seven nights a week, you could
join the party. For a few years during the 1950s, the Club Manhattan
was home base for the Kings of Rhythm, participants in the area’s
vibrant music scene, one that spanned jazz, blues, classical, rhythm
and blues, and rock & roll. (Tina calls the spot “Club Manhattan”
in the song and in her memoir; Ike calls it the “Manhattan Club”
in his memoir, and that was the name on the front of the building.)
St. Louis and East St. Louis count among their native and adopted
mid-century African American musicians jazz trumpeters Clark
Terry and Miles Davis, pioneering rock & roll guitarist Chuck Berry,
blues guitarist Albert King, opera singers Grace Bumbry and Robert
McFerrin Sr., r&b and soul singer Fontella Bass, avant-garde jazz
musicians Julius Hemphill and Oliver Lake, and, of course, Ike and
Tina Turner.
ke Turner and Anna Mae Bullock met in St. Louis, but
they were not from St. Louis. They had moved to the city
known as the “Gateway City to the West” within a few
years of each other in the mid-1950s and were among
the estimated six million African Americans who left the
South for the Northeast, Midwest, and West between 1916
and 1970 to seek economic opportunities and relief from
the daily violence of the region’s entrenched system of
segregation. This Great Migration was the largest internal
movement of U.S. citizens in American history, and it reshaped the
nation’s social and cultural landscapes. In their new homes, usually
cities, recent arrivals from the South maintained some of the old
Previous spread: Source photo © RGR Collection/Alamy
Southern ways, but they also adopted new practices. The making
and consuming of music continued but adjusted to the pace and en-
ergy of their new environs. This rural-to-urban, South-to-elsewhere
movement of African American musicians shaped the sound and feel
of genres such as gospel, jazz, blues, r&b, and rock & roll. Musical
styles were altered and created through the use of new instruments
such as the electric guitar in the blues; new styles of playing such
as the honking solos of r&b saxophone players and the rapid-fire,
virtuosic chord changes and improvisations of bebop musicians;
and the making of new connections such as the mixing of secular
rhythms and sacred subjects that propelled gospel, and the fusion
of blues, r&b, country, and Latin music that produced rock & roll.
The music these innovative artists created and performed gained
popularity among non–African American audiences and was soon
being performed by non–African American artists. In time, these
African American–rooted forms became representative of American
music, a radical development in a segregated country that relegated
its African American citizens to second-class status.
In spite of movement and change, mid-century Black Southern
migrants noted that the racial dynamics in their newly adopted cit-
ies were similar to conditions they had hoped to leave behind. They
coined the term “Up South” to mark the persistent presence of the
South’s racially restrictive practices in regions that were outside of
the South. Historian Walter Johnson observes that this was certainly
true of St. Louis and, in The Broken Heart of America: St. Louis and
the Violent History of the United States, argues “that St. Louis has
been the crucible of American history—that much of American his-
tory has unfolded from the juncture of empire and anti-Blackness
in the city of St. Louis.” In an introduction to a collection of inter-
views with African American residents, Lift Every Voice and Sing:

Ike & Tina Turner, 1963. © Gilles Piccard/Dalle/ZUMA Wire. Concert ticket and Washington Park Lots map, 1910, courtesy the
Missouri History Museum Archives, St. Louis. Ike and Tina Turner c. 1972. © van Houten/Pictorial Press Ltd/Alamy OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 123

Tina Turner in a nightclub, c. 1957.
St. Louis African Americans in the Twentieth Century, Ann Morris
observes, “Missouri had been a slave state before the Civil War but
stayed in the Union during the rebellion. After the war, St. Louis and
Missouri continued to observe many of the customs and practices
of the South. All public schools in Missouri were segregated by law,
and most public facilities, including restaurants, hotels, department
stores, theaters, and hospitals, were segregated in practice.” Upon
her arrival in St. Louis in 1956, Anna Mae Bullock would have found
that the city operated according to many of the rules of Jim Crow
she had experienced in Tennessee. She enrolled at Sumner High
School, founded in 1875, the first high school for African Americans
established by a public school district west of the Mississippi. Ef-
forts to desegregate the city’s schools began in the wake of the U.S.
Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka deci-
sion, but the stark residential segregation, buttressed by restrictive
covenants, redlining, and practices of steering Black home buyers to
a limited set of neighborhoods, undermined the process. The open-
ing lines of Gail Milissa Grant’s book, At the Elbows of My Elders,
about her middle-class African American family’s experience in St.
Louis, capture the social and racial contours of this time. “When
I grew up in St. Louis in the 1950s,” she writes, “it was a town of
contradictions: at once brawny and slumbering, industrial and mom
and pop, ethnically diverse and staunchly segregated, corn fed and
124 WINTER 2021
among the ten largest cities in the United States. It was
also known as the American city that typified the most
Northern of the Southern cities and the most Southern
of Northern.”
Ike Turner (1931–2007), born and raised in Clarks-
dale, Mississippi, moved to St. Louis in 1954. He was
already, at age twenty-three, a professional musician
and chose to settle in a city with an active live music
scene and proximity to even more clubs across the river
in the Illinois towns such as East St. Louis and Brooklyn.
Turner gravitated to music at an early age and learned to
play boogie-woogie-style piano from bluesman Pinetop
Perkins, a local fixture in Clarksdale. Turner joined a
swing-style big band in high school, meeting the musi-
cians who would eventually form the group known as
the Kings of Rhythm. In early 1951, this band recorded
“Rocket 88,” a swinging, slightly distorted number that
many rock history aficionados identify as the first rock & roll record.
To Turner’s everlasting chagrin, the song, which went to number
one on the rhythm and blues charts, was credited to Jackie Brenston
and His Delta Cats, foregrounding the track’s vocalist and leaving off
Turner and the Kings of Rhythm. This denied Turner the recognition
and promotional benefits of being associated with a hit record. He
nevertheless subsequently connected with Joe Bihari of Modern/
RPM Records and began a stint as a talent scout, locating promis-
ing blues and r&b musicians in Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and
Florida, traveling throughout the region with Bihari to record them.
In many cases, he wrote songs for these artists so they would have
original material for their records. Turner played piano on a num-
ber of sessions—perhaps most notably on the track “Three O’Clock
Blues,” the single, released late in 1951, that earned blues great B. B.
King his first number-one r&b hit—and continued to work with his
own band, taking up the guitar when he determined that reliable
pianists were easier to find than reliable guitarists.
In 1954, Turner brought his band to Ned Love’s Club in East St.
Louis. The Kings of Rhythm, an ensemble featuring guitar, bass,
drums, trombone, saxophones, and male vocalists, were a hit, and
the band quickly got bookings at other clubs in the area. Turner’s
band was soon playing fourteen jobs a week around town and quickly
became a well-regarded local act. Recalling the crowds at their
Photo courtesy Jim O’Neal
shows, Turner said, “You couldn’t get in no place we were playing hours, from about two A.M. on, at the Club Manhattan, across
at.” The lucrative live music scene and the fact that his older sister the river in East St. Louis. None of the doctors and things that
had put down roots in St. Louis and had been encouraging him to Alline was dating would go to places like that—they’d go to the
do the same convinced Ike to make St. Louis his home. high-class restaurants and cocktail bars, you know? So Alline
Two years later, when Anna Mae Bullock arrived in St. Louis, Ike would go with the girlfriends. Because Ike Turner and the Kings
Turner’s Kings of Rhythm was firmly established as the city’s hot- of Rhythm were what was happening—in St. Louis they were as
test act. Fellow rock & roll pioneer and St. Louis native son Chuck big as the Beatles would be later on. But they had a pretty rough
Berry was also a presence on the scene, but with nationally charting reputation, too, and the idea of a teenager like me going to one
hits he was usually on the road. Week in and week out, the Kings of of those clubs to see them was definitely a don’t.
Rhythm played the circuit of local clubs, often ending the night at
the Club Manhattan where they rocked and rolled until the break But teenage Anna Mae did. She and her sister convinced their
of dawn. Anna Mae’s older sister Alline wanted her to experience mom to give her permission to go out with Alline and, “dressed up
the vibrant nightlife, so one evening she took her, at only sixteen, in some of [Alline’s] clothes, with lipstick and all of that,” underage
to the Club Manhattan. It would be Anna Mae’s introduction to the Anna Mae set out to pass as an adult so she could go to the Club
big city she had only recently moved to from Nutbush. Manhattan, a place where Black people gathered to drink, dance,
Anna Mae Bullock was born in 1939 in Brownsville, Tennessee, gamble, and let off steam.
and grew up in Nutbush, a small farming town in western Tennes- Anna Mae formed an immediate and unfavorable opinion of this
see. When she was three years old, her parents moved to Knoxville section of town: “I didn’t like East St. Louis,” Turner notes in her
and then on to other cities seeking lucrative wartime employment, memoir. “It seemed like the South to me.” Her points of reference
while Anna Mae and Alline remained behind and were primarily were the Black public entertainment spaces she had experienced
raised by their grandparents and other relatives. Although she as a child when her family would visit Ripley, the big town near
spent a brief time in Knoxville with her parents, Turner describes Nutbush. On Saturday nights, Anna Mae, Alline, and their cousins
herself as a “country girl” in her memoir. She was also someone would go to the movies while the adults got down to partying in a
who loved music: the country music she heard at the first live band section of Ripley called the Hole, “the gaudy strip of black rib joints
performance she ever saw; the music she heard at the Pentecostal and boozy jukes down a cobbled back alley off Washington Street.”
church she sometimes attended with a neighbor; the country, blues, Turner’s description of the scene in the Hole in the late 1940s echoes
and r&b she heard on the radio; and the songs featured in the Hol- depictions of Black leisure-time spaces that dotted the South:
lywood movies that she watched at the local theater. Above all, she
loved to sing and began to do so formally at There was all kinds of
the Spring Hill Baptist Church when she was stuff going on down
nine or ten years old and joined the youth there—on the streets,
choir. Following the death of her maternal in the bars, every-
grandmother, the person who had been her UNDERAGE where. Everybody had
primary caregiver, Anna Mae moved to St. their best clothes on.…
ANNA MAE SET
Louis to join her mother and Alline. And the jukebox would
Anna Mae lived in St. Louis for about six OUT TO PASS be playing—boogie-
years (and it’s where she became Tina Turner, AS AN ADULT woogie and blues—and
about which more later), but in her memoir the women would all
she says little about the city or the impact of SO SHE COULD be flirting and gyrating
moving from the Southern countryside and GO TO THE CLUB and dancing and smok-
acclimating to the new environment of a big ing and drinking beer….
city halfway through high school. What she
MANHATTAN, There were fights down
dwells on is the world of nightlife and enter- A PLACE WHERE in the Hole, too, and they
tainment in St. Louis and East St. Louis that BLACK PEOPLE were scary… But it was
became the site of her professional education. all kind of wonderful, all
“I started going to the clubs,” she explains, GATHERED that action down there in
“because Alline was already doing that sort TO DRINK, DANCE, the Hole.
of thing.” Alline was about nineteen years
old at this time and she showed her younger
GAMBLE, AND In East St. Louis, Anna Mae
sister how to be a grown woman out on the LET OFF STEAM. witnessed some of the same
town, one who enjoyed the respectable night boisterous goings-on she had
spots in St. Louis, but also ventured into the seen in the Hole, recounting
rough and raucous clubs of East St. Louis. In “all that action”—eating,
her memoir, Tina Turner recalls, drinking, gambling, danc-
ing—in the song “Club Manhattan.” The Club Manhattan could
…on weeknights after work Alline had the dates. But on week- hold about 250 people; the stage was in the middle of the room,
ends, she and her girlfriends would get together and they would surrounded by tables. One wall featured a large painting of the
go to see Ike Turner, first at the Club D’Lisa, and then, after Kings of Rhythm. On Anna Mae’s first night at the club, she took note

OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 125
of the fact that women made up the majority of the audience and, out-of-town gig, and ultimately becoming a featured vocalist on two
in a departure from the segregation that governed life in Nutbush or three songs with the band nightly. She would sing the B. B. King
and St. Louis, both Black and white women were in attendance. Her song “You Know I Love You,” and “Since I Fell for You,” a popular
initial response to the Club Manhattan was a lack of interest, even aballad first recorded by Ella and Buddy Johnson in 1945.
bit of boredom, but all of that changed when Ike Turner joined his In Tina’s estimation, the Kings of Rhythm’s predominantly female
band on the stage, emanating a charisma that she appreciated even audience liked her because she did not seem like competition for
though she did not find him physically attractive. “But there was them. “I didn’t have a big ass,” she explains in her memoir, “so they
something about him,” she explains. “Then he got up onstage and didn’t think the guys would be interested in me, right? So, soon
they’re going, ‘Girl, you can siing!’” Anna Mae, known in the band as
picked up his guitar. He hit one note, and I thought: ‘Jesus, listen to
this guy play.’ And that joint started rocking. The floor was packed Little Ann, became an indispensable part of the group in the spring
with people dancing and sweating to this great music, and I was just of 1960 when she filled in for vocalist Art Lassiter at a recording
sitting there amazed, staring at Ike Turner. I thought, ‘God, I wonder
session. Unwilling to forfeit the money he had paid for the studio
why so many women like him? He sure is ugly.’ But I kept listening rental, Ike decided to have Little Ann lay down the vocal track on “A
and looking. I almost went into a trance just watching him.” Drawn Fool in Love.” He intended to strip out her vocal and replace it with
in by her first encounter with Ike and the Kings, Anna Mae, who had Lassiter’s at a later date. That plan was scuttled when Juggy Mur-
always loved to sing, set her sights on performing with the band. ray at Sue Records heard Little Ann’s track and insisted that it was
In a 1981 interview with Brant Mewborn, the late Rolling Stone worth releasing. This seems to be the point at which Ike christened
editor whose tapes are now in the collection of the New York Public Little Ann “Tina Turner,” solidifying her connection to him. And, he
Library, Tina described her experience joining the Kings of Rhythm reasoned, if she left him, as many of his previous vocalists had, he
as sounding “like a fairy tale,” but it is clear that the girl who would
could replace her with another woman he would call “Tina” so his
eventually become the Queen of Rock & Roll made her own luck. band could keep on performing. It did not work out that way. When
She recalled, Tina left Ike in 1976, she held on to the right to use the name Tina
Turner and went on to craft one of the more remarkable ascensions
Well, I had been following Ike around the city for about…maybe to pop music superstardom, doing so, miraculously, in her forties.
a few weeks trying to get his attention to let me sing and I guess During Anna Mae’s early years with the Kings of Rhythm, the band
he thought that I couldn’t. It was one of the after-hours clubs was expanding its audience beyond the Black community. Ike recalled
and we were sitting, my sister and I and our little party, and it the racial demographics of the clubs that were part of his band’s
was intermission and it was one of those nights when Ike was on circuit in his memoir: “It was totally black at the Manhattan Club in
the stage creating and I knew the song he was playing. Someone East St. Louis, the Harlem Club in [Brooklyn] and the Kingsbury up
set a microphone down, the drummer, who was dating my sister in Madison, all in Illinois. The white clubs were the Club Imperial in
at the time. He was teasing with her. And I took the mic and I St. Louis and Johnny’s Lounge out in South St. Louis. After I gained
started singing. a heavy following among both blacks and whites, I
And Ike was a started demanding that blacks should be able to go to
little surprised white clubs and whites to black clubs.” This breakdown
because he of racial boundaries is a core element of the history
didn’t know that
ON THE WEST COAST of rock & roll, with white teens reveling in a musical
I could sing. I THEY ENJOYED sound and culture that segregation had kept from
mean he thought MORE FREEDOM AND them. Once they had found it, they made an effort to
that I was prob- immerse themselves in it, even against the wishes of
ably—you know ACCESS THAN IN their white elders. In his memoir Ike describes police
how some peo- ST. LOUIS, BUT STILL raids on the white clubs where white teenagers were
ple just think flouting the prohibition against socializing with African
they can sing or CONTENDED WITH Americans and recalls nights when car after car of
something? So RACIAL POLITICS— those same teens followed the Kings of Rhythm across
he called me up the Eads Bridge to join in the after-hours scene at the
SPECIFICALLY,
[on stage] and I Club Manhattan. Some racial barriers were eroding in
did like three or THE ENTRENCHED this Up South metropolis and, over the years of their
four numbers SEGREGATION recording career, Ike and Tina Turner released records
with him. Ev- that traversed the genres, ranging from rhythm and
eryone came in OF THE RECORDING blues to soul to rock to blues to country, and were
to see who was INDUSTRY. geared to attracting the kind of broad audience they
singing. had built in St. Louis.
Tina’s disclosures about Ike’s abusive behavior to-
Over the next ward her and his control of the pair’s professional for-
few years, bit by tunes—recounted in her 1986 memoir I, Tina, the 1993
bit, Anna Mae became a part of the band, first sneaking out to sing Hollywood biopic What’s Love Got to Do with It, Broadway’s Tina:
with the band on weekends without her mother’s knowledge, even- The Tina Turner Musical, and most recently the HBO documentary
tually getting her mom’s permission to travel with the band for an Tina—contribute to an image of someone whom Ike, Svengali-like,

126 WINTER 2021


Manhattan Club, 1983.
made into a star. It is worth noting, however, that Tina has long rec-
ognized what she brought to the partnership. In the 1981 interview,
she explained, “Ike taught me. He didn’t give me my talent. I’ve
always been a singer and dancer for as long as I can remember, from
when I was very young. But I didn’t know anything about singing
professionally or recording or traveling and he did. And I became
professional by working with him. I learned an awful lot from him.”
It is also worth noting that Tina, the electrifying singer and dancer,
is credited with writing half of the songs on Nutbush City Limits,
including “Club Manhattan” and the title track.
St. Louis was a crucial location, but in the end, it was just a stop
on the way to the big time. In the early Sixties, the couple moved
to Los Angeles to be closer to the center of the recording industry.
On the West Coast they enjoyed more freedom and access than in
St. Louis, but still contended with racial politics—specifically, the
entrenched segregation of the recording industry. The irony of it
all, built into the term Up South, is that the racial dynamics of the
South are the racial dynamics of the United States, dynamics that
African Americans are likely to encounter whether they are Down
South, Up North, or Out West. In 1964, not long after the Turners
had made Los Angeles their home, Malcolm X pointed this out with
characteristic insight in his “The Ballot or the Bullet” speech, ob-
serving “long as you’re south of the Canadian border, you’re south.”
To escape the Up South limitations that were endemic throughout
the United States, the Turners followed a path traveled by many
Photo by Jim O’Neal © The artist. Courtesy The University of Mississippi
Archives and Special Collections
African American musicians and took advantage of
an opportunity outside of their home country, one
that presented itself when their 1966 single “River
Deep, Mountain High,” produced by Phil Spector and
featuring his famous Wall of Sound, failed to connect
with American audiences. Spector’s hope was that the
song would both succeed with r&b fans and cross the
duo over to pop audiences, but the track’s orchestral
production was considered too white for Black radio
and Tina’s fierce vocals were deemed too Black for pop
radio. Without airplay, the song reached only number
eighty-eight on the pop charts when it was released
in the spring, but it was a success in England, where
the young music fans who were supporting blues- and
r&b-influenced bands such as the Yardbirds, the Ani-
mals, and the Who had an appetite for the single’s bold
sound. The Rolling Stones invited the Ike & Tina Turner
Revue onto their autumn tour of England, Scotland,
and Wales, giving them exposure to audiences hungry
for the raw power of Tina’s vocals. This overseas foray
expanded the duo’s fan base and had positive repercus-
sions back home. By the end of the 1960s, the Turners
were one of the only African American acts with a
foothold in rock, an increasingly lucrative corner of
the popular-music industry. They received attention
in the fledgling rock press—Tina was featured on the
cover of the second issue of Rolling Stone magazine in
1967—and, in an effort to reach out to rock fans, they
began to cover hard rock hits originated by white art-
ists such as the Beatles, the Stones, and Led Zeppelin.
Their 1971 version of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s
“Proud Mary” became the duo’s most successful single,
placing them in the top five on both the American pop
and r&b charts, earning them invitations to appear on television in
the U.S. and abroad, and winning them a Grammy.
The departure from the United States was both professionally and
personally important to Tina. “England,” she writes in her memoir,
“was the beginning of everything for me—the beginning of my es-
cape from Ike Turner I guess you could say, and the beginning of me
seeing a new way of life.” The recognition she received overseas and
the friendships she established with British musicians were crucial
to her ability to develop her extraordinarily successful solo career
and become one of rock & roll’s biggest stars.
With her fiery on-stage energy and vocal style, Tina Turner has
entertained audiences around the world and has been an inspira-
tion and template for numerous artists—among them Mick Jagger,
Janis Joplin, Steve Marriott of Humble Pie, Rod Stewart, Melissa
Etheridge, Beyoncé, and Brittany Howard. Her dance moves, phras-
ing, and vocals influenced the look and sound of rock & roll in the
Sixties, Seventies, Eighties, and beyond and continue to be a part
of the global popular music vocabulary in the new millennium.
Working with Ike Turner, one of the founding figures of rock & roll,
Tina Turner learned her craft in the small clubs of East St. Louis,
Illinois, and St. Louis, Missouri, sharpening her skills before exu-
berant audiences of both Black and white fans. They did not know
it at the time, but they were the earliest witnesses to the rise of the
Queen of Rock & Roll. Her reign began upsouth in East St. Louis at
the Club Manhattan.
OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 127
 P R E S E N T S

GOOD

LIVING
GOOD

READING
GOOD

TAST I N G
GOOD

LISTENING
Good Living, Good Reading, Good Tasting, Good Listening – we all have a different in-
terpretation of each. Our feelings will be driven by our individual experiences, whether
they are based on a particular item, destination, or activity that has special meaning to us.

It could be a song performed by a band we enjoyed either in person or virtually, a

dinner at our favorite restaurant, a book we became engrossed in, or a piece of art-
work that stopped us in our tracks – it all comes back to the power of the experience.

This special section highlights just a few of the wonderful opportunities to engage in
the South’s wide-ranging creative, educational, and pleasurable experiences.
We invite you to explore, support, and share the offerings featured within.

SPECIAL PROMOTIONAL SECTION

G O O D L I V I N G , G O O D R E A D I N G , G O O D TA S T I N G , G O O D L I S T E N I N G

SPECIAL PROMOTIONAL SECTION

THREE STARS. THOUSANDS OF STORIES.

A 1976 Performance costume and Original 1947 neon sign from the A Sony TC270 reel-to-reel tape player
mid-1960s Kingston banjo belonging to Ernest Tubb Record Shop with a and platinum award belonging to Estelle
Dolly Parton 1948 Rock-Ola Model 1428 jukebox Axton, co-founder of STAX Records

These are only a few of the thousands of artifacts and stories

from across the state at the Tennessee State Museum.
Experience them all and plan your visit today.

1000 Rosa L. Parks Blvd. (at Jefferson Street) - Nashville, TN 37243

Free admission - TNMuseum.org - 615.741.2692 - 800.407.4324
 G O O D L I V I N G , G O O D R E A D I N G , G O O D TA S T I N G , G O O D L I S T E N I N G

Sewanee MFA in creative writing

Earn your MFA in creative writing starting next summer on our beautiful
mountaintop campus in Sewanee, Tennessee. Apply this winter and join us for
our 2022 session. Learn more on our website: letters.sewanee.edu
Current and recent faculty: Chris Bachelder, Barbara Black, Nickole Brown,
Ryan Chapman, Tiana Clark, Sidik Fofana, Jessica Goudeau, Jamie Quatro,
Mark Rasmussen, and John Jeremiah Sullivan.

Justin Taylor, Director | April Alvarez, Associate Director @SewaneeLetters

letters.sewanee.edu • 931.598.1636 • The University of the South • 735 University Ave. • Sewanee, TN 37383

An Evening with
Murphy Visiting Poet
Sharon Olds
April 14, 2022, 7:30 p.m.
Reves Recital Hall, Hendrix College
FR TH E U’L US!
EE E P HO L
& UB PE
O L
W O N

For a full list of events and more information please visit:

PE IC
N .
Y

TO

www.hendrJYNVSQIZPSH
t
www.facebook.com/HendrixMurphyFoundation
JO
I

www.twitter.com/HendrixMurphy

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 THE ROOTS OF AMERICAN MUSIC
RUN DEEP IN NORTH CAROLINA
COME HEAR NC FOR NC MUSIC STORIES.

Lakota John
ComeHearNC.com • #ComeHearNC Music at the Museum Series - NC Museum of Art

Upcoming exhibits What will you

Nov. 12 - Dec. 30, 2021
“Let it Glow” Light Show Walk-thru
and Drive-thru

Dec. 2, 2021 - Mar. 1, 2022

discover?
“The Fascinating World of Murray
Hudson’s Globes and Maps”

Mar. 1, 2022
Opening of our new educational
greenhouse

Mar. 31 - Oct. 28, 2022

Southern Artist Showcase: Hattie
Marshall-Duncan

Aug. 11 - Dec. 31, 2022

“Discover Steampunk: A Fantastical
Hands-On Adventure”

NASHVILLE

Plan your visit at discoveryparkofamerica.com

Union City, TN | 731-885-5455

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 G O O D L I V I N G , G O O D R E A D I N G , G O O D TA S T I N G , G O O D L I S T E N I N G

CHRISTONE “KINGFISH” INGRAM Various Artists Professor Longhair

662 (CD/LP)
“Ingram plays guitar with dramatic, searing tone and
sure-handed authority. And that’s just in the studio; he’s
even scarier live.” –NPR Music
“Ingram is the future of the blues, singing and playing
with edge, verve and vitality. Stinging guitar...sweet and
melodic vocals.” –Guitar World
50 Years Of Genuine
Houserockin’ Music (3CD/2LP)
Specially priced 3-CD and 2-LP anniversary collections
celebrating 50 years of Genuine Houserockin’ Music
featuring Hound Dog Taylor, Christone “Kingfish”
Ingram, Koko Taylor, Johnny Winter, Tommy Castro,
Marcia Ball, Albert Collins, Luther Allison, James Cotton,
Shemekia Copeland, Toronzo Cannon and many more!
Crawfish Fiesta (CD/LP)
The last, best album by the master musician who
virtually invented New Orleans rock’n’roll piano.
With Dr. John on guitar. Winner of the 1980 Blues
Music Award for “contemporary blues album of the
year.” LP is remastered with a previously unreleased
rehearsal track. “A masterpiece.” –Village Voice

Enter discount code OA2021 at alligator.com and receive 15% off these titles!
A L L I G A T O R R E C O R D S • G E N U I N E H O U S E R O C K I N ’ M U S I C S I N C E 1 9 7 1

Creativity lives here.

Nashville and the Vanderbilt MFA:
A community of talented people making art.
A great mix of progressive Southern culture,
creative energy and academic distinction.

You belong here.

Taught by Vanderbilt’s award-winning faculty and part of a
small group of writers making art and serving the community.
Our faculty includes poets Kate Daniels, Rick Hilles, Didi Jackson
and Major Jackson and fiction writers Tony Earley, Lorraine López,
Lorrie Moore and Nancy Reisman.
Recent alumni include poets Tiana Clark, Anders Carlson-Wee
and Edgar Kunz and fiction writers Matthew Baker, Bryn Chancellor
and Lee Conell.
* Visiting Writer, Spring 2022: Margaret Renkl For more information visit as.vanderbilt.edu/english.

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 OUT NOW ON

A seasonal record with vibe featuring originals, covers and standards. Peak Vinyl includes bonus dub LP The Sounding Joy.

Also out this holiday season: LAMBCHOP

A VERY CHRISTMAS I Hope You’re Sitting Down / Jack’s Tulips

FIRST TIME ON VINYL IN THE U.S.
10th Anniversary Deluxe Edition “…country enough to betray the Nashville heritage,
and un-country (clarinets, saxophones, etc.) sufficiently
Silver vinyl + 7” with three new songs to demonstrate Lambchop’s obdurate weirdness.” —Uncut
 G O O D L I V I N G , G O O D R E A D I N G , G O O D TA S T I N G , G O O D L I S T E N I N G

“a magnet for those of us

who like to have our
listening borders stretched.”
-T O R O N T O S TA R

M ARC H 24 –AP R IL 9, 2022

For tickets and more information,
please visit
savannahmusicfestival.org

EXPLORE THE
BLUE RIDGE MUSIC TRAILS

Head down the roads of Western North Carolina

to discover renowned bluegrass, ballad singing,
and old-time string band music. Come see where music
REALLY started...
Discover musical artists who hail from Alabama:
Lionel Richie, Tommy Shaw (Styx), Chuck Leavell
(The Rolling Stones), Percy Sledge, Jim Nabors,
Alabama, Rick Hall, Gary Baker, Tammy Wynette,
Emmylou Harris, Hank Williams, The Commodores,
The Temptations, Jimmy Buffet, Jason Isbell, Jamey
Johnson, and so many more. The Alabama Music Hall
of Fame celebrates all genres of music, encompassing
singers, songwriters, musicians, producers, managers,
radio stations and recording studios. Visit to see why
Alabama is where the music REALLY started.

Alabama Music Hall of Fame

www.alamhof.org
617 Hwy 72 West | Tuscumbia, AL
Open Tuesday - Friday 10am until 5pm
Saturday 10am until 4pm
BlueRidgeMusicNC.com After hours and private tours available for booking.

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 Picked by Bon Appétit “The Search for America’s Best
Magazine and Food Network Tacos: Favorite Tacos in the South”
as a “Top American Restaurant.”
—Serious Eats
—Bon Appétit

Selected as one of the “The fish tacos are as addictive as

“100 Southern Foods the Memphis pork barbecue tacos,
You Absolutely Must Try and the red sauce over an enchilada
Before You Die.” will put you in chile heaven.”
—Garden and Gun —John Kessler,
Atlanta Journal Constitution

CHESHIRE BRIDGE NASHVILLE NASHVILLE

2165 Cheshire Bridge Rd. 2317 12th Avenue South 4500 Charlotte Ave.
Atlanta, GA Nashville, TN 37204 Nashville, TN
(404) 321-1118 (615)-499-4293 (615)-490-3129

DECATUR CHAMBLEE WESTSIDE ATHENS

359 West Ponce De Leon Ave. 5001 Peachtree Blvd., Suite 910 1200-B Howell Mill Rd. 334 Prince Ave.
Decatur, GA Chamblee, GA Atlanta, GA Athens, GA
(404) 377-7668 (470) 321-3232 (404) 352-5811 (706) 353-3890

www.taqueriadelsol.com
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 " Our blues, jazz ,
swing, and
boogie woogie
are our spirituals
of the city
pav e m e n t,
o u r lo n g i n g . . ."
RICHARD WRIGHT

SONGBOOK NOTES ON THE

SOUND OF THE SOUTH
IN THE CITY
We move for work, or for love, or only for a short
spell of time. We migrate. We relocate. But we also twist,
shimmy, jive, and twirl. We dance. In movement, in motion,
we find fellowship across place and space. Across oceans,
land bridges, city blocks and street corners, mountain ranges
and long, wide plains, our sound moves with us,
making each corner of the world anew. In these dispatches
and meditations, great writers and musicians revel
in the irrepressibility of Southerners and our music.

Leon Bridges: photo © Pavielle Garcia. Adrian Quesada: Photo © Cristian Sigler. Aretha Franklin: film still courtesy OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 139
Amazing Grace Movie LLC. Terence Blanchard: photo © Cedric Angeles. Joi: photo courtesy of Joi Gilliam.
 BY Zandria F. Robinson
One of these mornings bright and fair /
I’m gonna take my wings and fly the air
W
hen Aretha Franklin, born in Memphis and raised in
Detroit, channeled Jesus Christ, born in Bethlehem and
raised in Nazareth, and called for Lazarus of Bethany
to come back from the dead, somebody or bodies in
Watts heard and heeded her voice and got up walking
like natural men. It was the second and final night of Franklin’s Janu-
ary 1972 performance recording of Amazing Grace in Los Angeles
at the New Temple Missionary Baptist Church. That night, Franklin,
clothed in heart-chakra green and angel white, came to relay the
good news in an old-time way: through a good Jerusalem rocking and
the performance of a miracle. Footage of her calling Lazarus back
from the tomb during “Mary Don’t You Weep” is missing from the
album’s documentary film, released in 2018. To be sure, the footage
and the film it finally became had a troubled technical and spiritual
history. It was infamously lacking the clappers that facilitate the syn-
ching of video and audio, and it had to await the arrival of modern
technology to reveal it like some DNA sitting in an evidence locker.
And Franklin famously did not want it to be released and blocked it
in all the ways she could until she flew home. When it was released,
and we flocked to see it wherever it was screened, possessing and
consuming it, willing it to fill us up full, we were collectively viewing
it over Franklin’s dead body.
I know why we all wanted to pull the film into our hearts with
our eyes and ears and whatever other senses we could reasonably
lay on it. The Amazing Grace album had been and still is a quintes-
sential staple of Black American families, as synonymous with the
Black domestic realm as the blues is with Saturday morning house
scourings. It is a reminder of and testament to ’Retha’s gospel roots
lest any of us got silly and forgot; in a pinch, it’s a damned good
substitute for church. In addition to its ancestral resonance and
spiritual beauty, it is the best-selling live gospel album of all time
because it is the only gospel album delivered by a prophet. From
the pulpit and the piano, Franklin preached the good news. In those
140 WINTER 2021
years after the assassinations and the riots, when the world outside
our homes shouted anew that we were not welcome, that we should
be in bondage in prisons or schools, or else we should be cast out
of our neighborhoods or this life altogether, the Amazing Grace
album was a cherished reminder that victory would one day be ours.
As ravenous as anyone else, the thing I had most wanted to see in
Amazing Grace was Franklin calling Lazarus. I had most wanted to
see the miracle performed, had longed to see the shape of Aretha’s
mouth when she called him forward, to confirm with my eyes that
somebody was raised and had come walking in the church loosed
of death. But alas it was not there. The editing of the documentary
conspicuously skips from Franklin recounting what Jesus had said
just before the resurrection—“for the benefit of you who don’t be-
lieve”—to just after that moment when Lazarus comes forth from
the tomb alive and well. I wondered who in Watts was restored that
evening? From what tombs did they emerge with full, warm breaths
in their bodies again? Did they walk into a corner store on South
Broadway and ask for water? I chuckled at Franklin’s protection
magic on earth and in heaven. The last time Jesus raised somebody
from the dead in front of a crowd of witnesses he was crucified.
The practical reason I wanted to see the mechanics of the resur-
rection was for research purposes. I wanted to understand what
went wrong two years prior when I had tried to call my daddy
Arthur Lee Robinson, born and raised in Glendora, Mississippi, and
how to make it right so it would work this time. In the hours after I
learned of his death, I had set an altar for him on an old vanity with
his picture, three white candles, some shells from a beach in Accra,
a glass of water with a lot of ice, and his third-favorite vice, peanut
M&Ms. I turned up “Mary Don’t You Weep” very loud, louder even,
drowning the sound of my own moaning and keeping it there under
water until it hushed. I went three miles from my house to Aretha’s
birth house on Lucy Avenue to see if I could borrow some dirt from
her yard to aid the miracle, but when I got there and got out, seeing
the house proud and abandoned, I got shamed. Who was I to come
over there all greedy and ask for a resurrection miracle from a thing
that was itself fighting to live? I went on back home and waited. It
was still yet early for him to hear me in that space between being
absent from the body and being present with the Lord, but I would
be ready and sure that my voice, along with that of Aretha calling
Lazarus, would be the first and loudest on that line. Intercession was
still possible. Hello? Come on back home. He would laugh so hard
at how good he had gotten us, the greatest trick of his life. And we
would never live it down, and that would be just fine. I was not ready
to hear myself weep and moan.
In the years since my father’s death I have been in search of repair
and restoration, and often I find it in Aretha’s voice somewhere, or at
Film stills courtesy Amazing Grace Movie LLC
the ocean, or at the river, same difference. Sometimes I find it in the
many voices that sing together with confidence about justice, about
the freedom coming, about the freedom being made right now. I find
it in the growing chants of “abolition now” on new and surprising
corners. Other times those voices find me, like those young people’s
horns and drums in the neighborhood school’s marching band that
wake me from August heat naps saying, yes, we are still here; and
yes, freedom is coming. Still other times I am just still and waiting,
not even sharpening my oyster knife.
“Mary Don’t You Weep” is one of many spirituals that promises
deliverance and repair by telling of God’s other miracles, notably
the parting of the Red Sea that facilitated the Jews’ escape from
the pursuing Egyptian army. In early versions of the song, like one
offered by the Fisk Jubilee Singers, the mere capacity to run or fly
away one day is enough of a covenant to hold a body over through
the world’s injustice. The rewards in heaven will be plentiful, and
any trauma of the earthly experience will be erased. (But I am still
weeping and moaning here, on Earth, now, I say.) The spiritual
deliberately marks the drowning of Pharaoh’s army in the Red Sea
behind the escaping Israelites as empirical evidence of a coming
salvation. As lagniappe insurance, God ensures the Egyptians’ dead
bodies are visible on the beach. Because it focuses on a miracle in
which the antagonist is not the devil, or a whale, or a lion, or a
OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 141
difficult test from God himself, but rather
an oppressive state, its army, and its leader,
“Mary Don’t You Weep” is a central Black
American rumination on divine justice and
balance in the wake of enslavement and its
immortal afterlives.
In later versions of the song, like the 1958
version by Inez Andrews and the Caravans,
the drowning becomes merely prologue to
the apex miracle, the resurrection of Laza-
rus. Women’s versions tend to tell the full
story of the weeping and mourning Mary
and Martha, so listeners can understand the
color and context of the women’s grief be-
yond the sometimes-chastising refrain, “oh,
Mary don’t you weep / oh Martha don’t you
moan.” It is the sisters’ grief, after all, that is
at least in part the cause of Jesus’s own tears.
In this version, the women can cease their
mourning not solely because of Lazarus’s
eternal life with God in heaven, but moreover
because he will be restored to life
again on Earth. It is one thing for
the oppressor to be drowned; it is
another for its victims to have their
lives restored. It is the Caravans’
version, one tender with women’s
grief and sensitive to their desires
for a justice in the here and now
and not just in the hereafter, that
Aretha offers on Amazing Grace.
While you wait for the drowning,
you fly. Hundreds of thousands of
Black folks flew from the South af-
ter the Second World War in search
of new lives and new freedom. They
brought with them all the choco-
late cities of the South, the songs
and prayers and chants, the hoodoo and the
haints, a quarter of the tambourines, and an
eighth of the cooking. Daddy would say Los
Angeles was just Mississippi niggas who got
so tired of Texas they went all the way to
the ocean. They made and grew themselves
anew in that hot concrete. They were artists,
revolutionaries, and glamorously famous;
their descendants made streetwear, crip
walking, and funk-inspired gangsta rap. But
at the ocean, each generation found more
war, familiar and foreign, but with similar
outcomes. Still, they looked up at the sky
and patted their chests and said, “Oh, but
hallelujah, we ain’t in Texas/Mississippi/
Arkansas/Louisiana no more.” It can be so
hard to fly home.
Seven summers prior to Aretha’s flight
from New York City to Los Angeles to per-
form the miracle on South Broadway, the
142 WINTER 2021
Watts community in Los Angeles had been
the site of an uprising against police brutality
and a retaliatory massacre. Most of the thir-
ty-four killed by the combined state forces
of the police and the National Guard were
Black. More than one thousand were injured,
generations broken by memory and matter.
What was destroyed materially by fire had
already been tainted by the socioeconomic
and psychic harm racism had wrought. It
bore the mark and was not spared. Some-
times while you wait for the drowning, you
try clearing the land with hot orange light
and beginning again.
In the years leading up to that 1965 sum-
mer, and predictably in the years after, the
story was the same as it was everywhere up
South and out South and down South—hous-
ing conditions were dangerous, education
was racist, police were abusive, destructive,
murderous. In the spring of 1962, police had
raided and desecrated a Nation of Islam
mosque, injuring several people and killing
Ronald Stokes. In 1964, non-Black California
voters repealed, via a proposition vote, a fair
housing act that would have ensured that the
swelling numbers of Black people redlined in
South Central Los Angeles could more freely
move about the city and state and away from
conditions of repression and harm. After the
years of crescendo, the raucous and massa-
cring wave of summer ’65, and the inevitable
crash to sameness thereafter, some people
thought that if they changed the name or
didn’t call it Watts anymore, the murdered
and the survivors and the inheritors would
forget. But they carried the memories every-
where in their mouths. Plus, even if you burn
it down, a place never forgets its own name.
Sometimes fire is the only way to make sure
somebody remembers.
Migration, or birth or death, is flight: fly-
ing to earth from some otherworldly space,
moving across the world from place to place,
flying home to the sky again. Prayer or ritual
or worship is intercession: sequential chants
of magic aimed toward an outcome. Resur-
rection, rebirth or re-living, is reparation: to
put something back as it was and also anew.
Black people had moved everywhere across
space and time in search of a place to just
be and after all of that Tulsa was Atlanta
was Detroit was Buttermilk Bottom was The
Other Side of the Tracks was only as differ-
ent as they could make it, which was often a
marvel, given they were up against the same
kind of white folks everywhere. After what
Pharaoh had done to the people of Watts for
so many years, a flight, a prayer, and a resur-
rection or few was the tiniest but mightiest
kind of balm.
With James Cleveland and the South-
ern California Community Choir,
Aretha and her band prepared a
way for the resurrected to come
through. The revival begins at the
end of “God Will Take Care of
You,” as the sounds of the sancti-
fied church, that migrating bass,
the organ, the tambourine, and all
manner of percussion—hand, feet,
and drum—electrified New Temple.
In concert with the ancestors, the
saints opened a portal from that
side to this one for whosoever, per-
secuted on earth, wanted to come
forward again, for just a moment
or for the rest of a new, natural life,
and dance in praise. Then on “Old
Landmark,” Franklin indicates that she is
about to preach in the old way, to show and
not just tell, to perform an old miracle. Kneel-
ing and praying and telling the story. From
there, “Mary Don’t You Weep” is a calculated,
intentional march toward the miracle at the
ocean. I don’t need to see it on some tape to
know it happened.
Entries into and exits from this world, how-
ever they come, by whoever’s hands, a loving
strong catch of a midwife on Lucy Avenue
or strangling state hands that steal breath
on Every Street, always mean flight. They
mean heaven. They mean tables prepared
for us. They mean death came and we still
won because we’ll never grow old. For the
rest of us, they mean a whole lot of weeping
and moaning while we wait for the drown-
ing, and finally, the restoration, where we all
come out again walking like natural men.
 MORE BRIDGES THAN WALLS
G
rowing up in Laredo, Texas, on the U.S.-
Mexico border in the 1990s, Adrian Que-
sada spent his teenage years consumed
by hip-hop and punk rock, like many
other kids growing up in the glory days
of grunge and backpack rap.
But wherever he went—family gatherings, street
festivals, and trips across the Rio Grande—the
rhythms of Mexican rancheros and cumbia, as
well as the r&b stylings of local artists like Ruben
Ramos, Little Joe, and Sunny & the Sunliners, left
impressions on him.
“I didn’t realize until later that I just absorbed
all that, growing up between two cultures,
and Nuevo Laredo and Laredo,” says the pro-
ducer and musician, who makes up one-half
of Black Pumas, over the phone from Austin,
Texas. “Half of my family was in Mexico and
the other half was on the United States side.
I would go back and forth and soak it all in.
But to be totally honest, I didn’t really start
appreciating the music that was around me
until I was well into college.”
Laredo and South Texas lie at the conflu-
ence of musical traditions that reach down
to Colombia and over to the American Deep
South. While cultural exchanges between
Mexico and the American South date back at
least a century to culinary traditions passed
between the borderlands, one of many musical
swaps emerged after World War II that changed
the course of popular music.
The epicenter of what became known as
Chicano soul was more than one hundred miles
north of Laredo, in San Antonio, a city where the
majority of residents claim some Latin ancestry
and where 80,000 members of the armed forces
live between four military installations dotting the
region. Soldiers from different parts of the country
converged here and shared musical ideas in those
crucial years between the late ’40s and early ’60s,
inspiring artists like Ruben Ramos to embrace r&b,
first in groups like his brother’s Alfonso Ramos
Orchestra and then in his own Ruben Ramos & the
Mexican Revolution on several independent records
in the ’70s. Another influential group of the era, Little
Joe and the Latinaires, explored soul and funk on
albums like Soul Pride.
“You had these Mexican kids and Black kids that
were in the military and kind of all brought their own
music to the table,” he says.
Listen to “Tell It Like It Is,” an accompanying
144 WINTER 2021 playlist by Adrian Quesada, while you read.
BY JIM BEAUGEZ
Local musicians began mixing the rhythms, ar-
rangements, and melodies of Southern soul with
local Tejano—itself a combination of traditional
Mexican music with horns and the polka beats of
Eastern European immigrants in the region—and
cumbia, a melding of western African rhythms with
indigenous musical traditions that migrated north
from its origin in villages along the Rio Magdalena
in Colombia.
This vivid collage of influences finally found
Quesada while he was studying at the University
of Texas in Austin. Quesada joined an ensemble
that played Afro-Caribbean music—cumbia, salsa,
merengue, and música criolla, in particular—which
reintroduced him to the rhythms he heard in his
youth. From there he explored other regional music
of Mexico, “stuff that has been around me all my life,
but I always blew it off,” he says. With friends from
back in Laredo, he formed Grupo Fantasma, a Latin-
centered band that drew from cumbia, psychedelic
rock, hip-hop, and funk, and were hand-picked by
Prince to open shows during a residency at his Rio
club in Las Vegas.
“I started to dig and find more of those early
records, and that led me to realize that Sunny &
the Sunliners had been developing his own brand of
soul, and Ruben Ramos had always dabbled in soul,
and [Little] Joe and Johnny Hernandez had always
dabbled in soul,” he says. “And it really resonated
with me because it provided some perspective for
what my friends and I were doing in our generation.
Scan the code within the Spotify app or visit Oxford
American Magazine on Spotify to stream the playlist.
We were into hip-hop and funk and this and that,
but we were now interpreting the music we grew
up with through that filter.”
While co-leading Black Pumas with frontman
Eric Burton today, Quesada has also taken on the
role of conservator for the genre by assembling key
artists for original compositions and re-recordings
of Chicano soul classics on the 2018 compilation
Look at My Soul: The Latin Shade of Texas Soul [Na-
cional/Amazon Music]. He produced the record—as
well as the Black Pumas recordings, which have
racked up four Grammy nominations—at his own
Electric Deluxe Recorders studio in Austin, itself an
investment in documenting the evolution of
Chicano soul, hip-hop, and r&b, particularly
in southern Texas.
Quesada cast a wider net for Look at My
Soul, though, corralling artists from Califor-
nia’s Latin soul scene as well as Baltimore-
raised and Brooklyn-based Aaron Frazer, who
performs with Durand Jones & the Indications
and as a solo artist. “I was just like, this is
so cool that ‘Chicano soul’ almost sounds
intimidating to somebody who may not be
Chicano, but it’s really just so amazing how
they embrace anything that feels good.”
One of the most memorable moments of
the recording sessions for Quesada happened
when he brought in singer Tomar Williams
from Austin and San Antonio–based Jonny
Benavidez, a “walking encyclopedia of Chicano
soul and old soul music…who’s really keeping
that torch alive of Chicano, really trying to
connect with soul music in kind of his own way.”
The duo collaborated with Johnny Hernandez on a
cover of “Ain’t No Big Thing,” a song he originally cut
with his brother, Little Joe, in 1967 for Little Joe and
the Latinaires. At seventy-four, Hernandez’s vocals
sound strong on the nearly note-for-note recreation,
blending with ambered horns and wrapped in Que-
sada’s warm, lived-in production.
“I remember they were singing backup vocals
on that song, and Johnny went over and sang with
them, and just seeing them connect and have fun,
it was almost like I could flash back fifty years and
see Johnny and what it must’ve been like for him,
to see black, brown, white, all kinds of people all in
this recording session and all just this exchange of
ideas and energy,” says Quesada.
“What I love about that kind of Chicano soul thing
is, it really has more bridges than it does walls.”
Photo © Cristian Sigler
 BY Joi Gilliam
I
n the summer of 1993, I wrote and re-
corded my first album, The Pendulum
Vibe, in less than two weeks with Dallas
Austin at his Atlanta studio, DARP. I was
twenty-two. We’d met the previous year
at a Music Row studio in Nashville, my home-
town, where he was recording an album for
the experimental funk band Highland Place
Mobsters and enjoying newfound success
as one of the world’s hottest young music
producers with hits for ABC, TLC, and Boyz
II Men already under his belt.
Our creative kinship was instant. I was
the Black Southern belle rebel who refused
to conform to the constraints of expected
creative homogeny. Dallas was the young
gun with the Midas touch who knew his way
around the music industry and welcomed the
opportunity to explore uncharted territory
with me. We were very proud of the album
we created and had many impromptu listen-
ing sessions with comrades and associates
from all over the country. Their reaction was
always, “Play it again.”
The album begins with “Stand,” the first
verse of a song called “I’m Gon’ Stand!!!” by
Sweet Honey in the Rock.
We will not bow down to racism
We will not bow down to injustice
We will not bow down to exploitation
I’m gon’ stand
I’m gon’ stand
“Stand” introduced my own song called
“Freedom.” And “Freedom” was chosen for
the soundtrack of the 1995 Mario Van Peebles
film Panther, after the soundtrack’s supervi-
sor heard the song via DARP’S “hold music.”
It became a unifying battle cry performed by
a large ensemble of music’s best and bright-
est Black female artists at the time. All these
amazing women—many I grew up listening
to and admiring, some just starting out like
me—all there to sing MY song. Queen Latifah,
Mary J. Blige, Yo-yo, TLC, Aaliyah, Patra, En
Photo courtesy the author
Vogue, Vanessa Williams, Caron Wheeler,
Brownstone, Pebbles, and Amel Larrieux. I
was there and it still seems unreal. Thanks to
the video and a few photos floating around
the ’net I am often reminded of my early style:
the top hat, long blond braids, my favorite
black sequined leggings my mom gave me,
a vintage button-down tied in the front, my
favorite silver stilettos that I wore damn near
every day.
Angie Stone, the vocal arranger, directed
us as a choir. We were all different musicians,
but the world got to feel us as one wonderful,
unified voice. After filming and recording for
the better part of the day, the soundtrack
executives decided to add “Stand” to the
track, as well, to accommodate the overflow
of participation.
I ’d seen Sweet Honey in the Rock sing at
Fisk Memorial Hall, the home performance
venue of the Jubilee Singers, when I was in
junior high. Dr. Bernice Johnson Reagon, Ev-
elyn Maria Harris, and Ysaye Maria Barnwell
taught me what it means to lead a song. As
they stood on that stage, I was enraptured by
all that they were: regal, beautiful, brilliant,
unapologetically Black women, masters of
their craft doing the righteous work of heal-
ing through the gift of song. I devoured every
morsel I could find of their discography:
“In the Upper Room,” “No Images,” “Free-
dom Song,” “Meyango,” “Testimony,” “Gift
of Love,” and “Battle for My Life.” Seeing
them live and studying them daily sparked
and crystalized my passion for variety in song
composition. The differences in their voices
combined so perfectly to make an even more
distinct collective sound, and deepened my
appreciation for vocal originality.
My entire childhood I feasted on a con-
sistent diet of music that demanded a soul-
opening abandon, like Minnie, Prince, Chaka,
S.O.S. Band, Marvin, Labelle, Sade, Luther,
Whitney, Rick and the Mary Jane Girls, and
my childhood pastor, Oscar C. Myles, who
would whip the congregation into such a
shouting praise frenzy he couldn’t even
preach the sermon. I watched Parliament-
Funkadelic land the Mothership when I was
six and saw Michael Jackson, Stephanie Mills,
and Teddy Pendergrass at Nashville’s Munici-
pal Auditorium when I was eight.
In tenth grade, I won the school talent
show when I sang a rendition of “Every-
thing Must Change” inspired by the great
Jean Carne. Fellow Nashvillian Gary “Lil
G” Jenkins, best known as the lead singer of
r&b group Silk, accompanied me on piano.
As I closed my eyes and took a deep breath
to sing “and hummingbirds do fly,” I was
hyper aware of how my voice sounded in
my own ears. How I felt as if I were roaring.
I held the note for several seconds and the
swell of the audience’s cheers intensified. I
took a dramatic, abrupt pause and my entire
body quickly shook and jerked with a ripple
wave from head to toe. I could not control
OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 145
that phenomenon. It demanded to have its
way and I could only oblige. I knew I had
been righteously invaded for my own good:
a lightning bolt of vulnerability and submis-
sion. The way the crowd went wild let me
know they felt it, too.
W ord soon got around that The Pendulum
Vibe was “on some next shit” and the
first single, “Sunshine & The Rain,” was the
fuse of that creative bomb. The video offered
a starkly different visual from what was ex-
pected of a Black artist on the early ’90s r&b
landscape. I never considered myself an r&b
artist, anyway. In the clip, I wore platform
shell-toe sneakers, blond low-cut hair, and a
sheer black nylon maxi-length dress, sporting
only a thong underneath. In other scenes I am
covered in silver glitter, hanging from
a meat hook, dancing under the desert
moonlight. I considered myself, with
no barriers of categorical constraint,
a dope creative who was here to cre-
ate original dope shit. The video and
album caught the attention of Lenny
Kravitz and Madonna, who tapped Dal-
las to produce Bedtime Stories after
hearing my songs.
My label didn’t even really know
what to call what I was doing. Who is
this peculiar Black girl from Tennes-
see? How do we even begin to market
this? Can she be a little bit more like
Mary J. Blige? (An actual question in
a meeting.) In spite of no significant
push from my label, regular features
in magazines like Vibe and Honey
and New York City scribes like Mimi
Valdes, Joan Morgan, PhD, and Emil
Wilbekin helped to keep me relevant
as an underground artist.
The proverbial mainstream was watch-
ing and taking notes, though. Quite a few
ingenues emerged looking very similar to
me; some were even similarly named. Other
than U.K. artists, the only Black women mak-
ing what would later be known as alt soul or
progressive r&b were Meshell Ndegeocello
and me. “Biting” was a no-no back then, yet
it was clear to me that my swag was being
studied and incrementally copied by more
folks, male and female, than I can, or care to,
name. EVERYBODY was at my shows, leaving
with a vivid tale of what they saw, absorb-
ing my visuals and styles. At legendary ATL
venue The Point, I saw the style of my late
great sister friend Peach, the legendary front
woman of the funk rock band Whild Peach,
146 WINTER 2021
being regurgitated by another band as if it
were their own. In the thick of experienc-
ing the same kind of style siphoning, I was
inspired to write “Meow/Copycat” with Fish-
bone, which is the last track on my second
album, Amoeba Cleansing Syndrome. The
version on the album is from when I opened
for D’Angelo in Atlanta in ’95 at the Variety
Playhouse concert wearing silver nipplets,
black latex hot pants, a white boa, and silver
thigh-high boots, nods to Betty Mabry Davis
and my daddy.
Isuspect it has to do with being a five-decade
inhabitant of this wild-ass space-spinning
water ball we call home and my two-terabyte
brain being just about full, but when I think
of all that has happened, I’d be lying if I
claimed to be able to recall most of it. Per-
haps it’s the internalized heartbreak of every
wrong I’ve experienced. Being simultaneous-
ly heralded and disregarded within the music
industry is a mindfuck that has tested my
sanity, grace, grit, and self-understanding.
If not for my soul’s core knowing, I would
have succumbed to it long ago. I identify
as a fully protected being—even the worst
pains, losses, disappointments, and fuck-ups
have benefited me to some degree. Aging is
a bodacious gangster bitch, and the body
and mind have a way of jettisoning what
they don’t need.
January 25, 2021, my fiftieth birthday, was
a wondrous, miraculous, and strange mile-
stone. I did not know if I’d make it to fifty
or not. My dad, Joe Gilliam Jr., passed away
Christmas morning in 2000, four days shy of
his fiftieth. He was the first Black quarterback
in the NFL to start in a regular season game.
He had been exceptionally bright as a student
and an All-American in high school and col-
lege before going on to play for the Steelers.
A diver and swimmer, he threw me into the
pool at four to my mother’s horror, but I
swam like he was certain I would. Gregarious,
magnetic, deeply beloved, handsome, wild,
and funny. A wearer of silver platform knee
boots, man bags, and hip-hugging lace-up
bell bottoms. Shirt, optional. He proudly
taught me to throw a perfect spiral as a kid
and he proudly walked me down the aisle on
my wedding day.
I was twenty-nine when he died, so the
abstraction of fifty seemed like a far, far-away
land to which I’d never arrive. Yet, here
I am—older, wiser, with joints that
snap, crackle, and pop in the morn-
ing. In many ways, I am better. I re-
leased my fifth album, SIR Rebekkah
Holylove, twelve years after my fourth,
with pen and performance still in
tip-top shape. Still giving vanguard-
original realness since ’93 while of-
fering current grown-ass truths that
give a window to the complexity of a
liberated woman.
At fifty, my impact is woven into
the fabric of the Atlanta music scene
and every audacious Black artist in
this country who has come after me
whether they know it or not. As the
end of the analog wave approached
and the digital age dawned, fashion
audacity and sexual freedom owned by
a smart, carefree Black girl were not
the norm. I was an anomaly then. To
see confidence, self-awareness, body positiv-
ity, and intelligence become transformative
forces for so many young Black people lets
me know the future is ours just as I always
knew it would be. I have done my part to
make it so.
I feel like a super smokin’ hot youthful
OG Godmama who observes her children
proudly from a distance. Who knew when
3 Stacks said, “the South got somethin’ to
say,” that those words were prophecy giving
future generations unshakable ground to
stand on? The South influences everything
these days while still fighting for its respect.
The more things change the more they stay
the same. That’s the thing about audacity.
It’s contagious and every new generation
ups the ante.
Photos by Daniel Hastings. Courtesy the author
 HOUSTON MEETS BROOKLYN IN
UGK’S “ BIG PIMPIN’”
I
n the spring of 2000, Pimp C delivered one of
the most iconic lines in the history of Houston
rap: “What y’all know about them Texas boys?”
The verse closed out the Jay-Z hit “Big
Pimpin’” from his fourth studio album, Vol. 3...
Life and Times of S. Carter. It was the New York rap-
per’s first platinum single, nominated for a Grammy,
and reached number one on Billboard’s Rhythmic
Airplay charts. Timbaland produced the hypnotic
track, and fans of his previous singles for Aaliyah
(“If Your Girl Only Knew,” “Try Again”) and Ginuwine
(“Pony”) will recognize his signature off-kilter per-
cussive bounce. A breezy flute sample from a 1957
song by Egyptian composer Baligh Hamdi provided
the melody (and later a copyright lawsuit), instilling
in the song a feeling of globe-trotting opulence that
would be complemented by a music video filmed
aboard a luxury yacht in Trinidad during Carnival.
But what made the song stand out from both
Timbaland and Jay-Z’s other radio hits was the
Lone Star swagger of Bun B and Pimp C from the
group UGK (Underground Kingz). The two rap-
pers’ contrasting styles—Bun’s silky-smooth lyri-
cism and Pimp’s gruff, chanting delivery—cast a
Texas-sized shadow over one of the world’s most
popular rappers.
Hailing originally from Port Arthur—the birth-
place of blues drummer Uncle John Turner and
psychedelic singer-songwriter Janis Joplin—UGK
were already local legends after years of indepen-
dent releases and regional touring. “They didn’t
need the industry, they had their own industry,”
says Matt Sonzala, former writer for Murder Dog
magazine and longtime Texas hip-hop promoter.
“The rap chitlin circuit was dominated by UGK. They
were the kings, there’s no denying that....They kind
of laid a blueprint, and respect just spread naturally.”
UGK’s first national success came in 1992
with their debut album, Too Hard to Swallow, on
Jive Records, including the single “Pocket Full
of Stones,” which was featured on the Menace II
Society soundtrack. The following year led to an-
other iconic Houston milestone: DJ Screw released
his first “chopped and screwed” tape, featuring
slowed down beats that became synonymous
with Houston.
Hip Hop in Houston author Maco L. Faniel
refers to UGK as “an affiliate of Screwed Up
Click” but distinguishes the duo’s style as
“country rap.” In an interview on BET’s Rap
City in 2007, Pimp C called lumping all Texas
Photo of Bun B and Pimp C.
BY DAN GENTILE
rappers into the same category a grave mistake,
and gave context for the UGK sound.
“What I’m doing there is called country rap tunes,”
said Pimp C, who often sampled other Southern
artists like the Meters and Johnny “Guitar” Watson.
“It’s a derivative of what was done in New York, and
what came from West Coast and what came from
hip-hop and was done with gangster music. But I’m
making country rap down there. It’s a little bit slower,
it’s got some church influence into it, so it’s got a
gospel feel. It’s got a soul feel to the music. We play
a lot of the instruments. And I can’t speak to those
other dudes, but me and Bun got something to say.”
By then, UGK had been featured on tracks by
rappers like Too $hort, Master P, and Three 6 Mafia,
whose 2000 single “Sippin’ on Some Syrup” became
another crossover radio hit. But they’d yet to reso-
nate with New York audiences. “New York artists
knew UGK, but the kids on the corner of Brooklyn
didn’t know who they were yet....They didn’t have
the identity yet,” says Sonzala.
The “Big Pimpin’” partnership began when Bun
B received a personal call from Jay-Z while he was
recording Vol. 3... Life and Times of S. Carter. Bun
B actually thought it was a prank and hung up, but
Jay-Z called back and they agreed to collaborate.
Bun B was on board, but Pimp C was still skepti-
cal: he had already declined an offer to guest on
Jay-Z’s “A Week Ago” in 1998. Describing the “Big
Pimpin’” beat to MTV News in 2005, Pimp C said,
“It sounded like a pop record to me. I didn’t want
to do it. It scared me, because I didn’t know how
people was going to take us going in that direction.”
Eventually Pimp C relented, but delivered a verse
marked by a stand-offish tone and insider refer-
ences to Houston culture (“lean up in my cup,”
“comin’ down in candied toys”).
“I don’t think people knew what the hell he was
talking about outside of his world,” Sonzala said. “He
very specifically made it as ‘Houston’ as possible.
Then Bun B went off, he was like, ‘Fuck y’all, I’m a
lyricist.’” Faniel added that Pimp C’s iconic line ask-
ing the King of New York what he knew about Texas
was “really like a slap in the face.” Jay-Z added eight
more bars after Pimp C’s verse to close the song,
bookending the Texas braggadocio.
The Hype Williams–directed video filmed on
a yacht in Trinidad cemented UGK’s presence on
the track and marked the only time Texas rappers
topped MTV’s Total Request Live. The video was
a convergence of global influences that, perhaps
unintentionally, showed more cross-cultural musi-
cal connections. Like hip-hop, the calypso music
associated with Carnival has roots as protest mu-
sic, rebelling against oppressive colonialism with
boasts, insults, and sexual innuendos that would
lead to government censorship early in the genre’s
development. And the mock battles that exemplify
the theatrics of Carnival celebrations paralleled
the subtext of Pimp C’s combative verse.
The video’s success was a gift and a curse. Jive
Records asked UGK to record a follow-up with Jay-Z
and Timbaland, including a second Hype Williams
video, but the gamble would cost an estimated $1.2
million. UGK declined, and their label retaliated by
failing to promote their next album.
M eanwhile, more Texas artists were blazing up the
charts. In the early aughts, albums from Devin
the Dude, Paul Wall, Chamillionaire, Mike Jones, Slim
Thug, and Lil’ Flip would all make national waves.
And Bun B’s 2005 album Trill, which recounted the
saga of the declined “Big Pimpin’” follow-up in the
song “The Story,” would debut at number six on the
Billboard Hot 100. In 2007, UGK would release the
smash hit “Int’l Players Anthem (I Choose You)”
featuring OutKast, followed a year later by a guest
verse from Bun B on M.I.A.’s “Paper Planes,” another
collaboration that introduced him to a new audience
of indie and electronic music listeners. Bun B would
go on to release four more studio albums and make
dozens of featured appearances with the likes of Lil
Wayne, Drake, and Gucci Mane.
In the twenty-one years since “Big Pimpin’” and
the wave of Texas breakouts that followed, countless
other Houston artists have made their mark on the
mainstream. From Travis Scott to Megan Thee Stal-
lion, Texas is no longer an outlier on the hip-hop map,
but rather a hotspot that dictates national
trends. Stepping outside that insular regional
culture wasn’t an easy decision, but as Bun
B told BET, it was a monumental moment.
“It was probably the biggest chance that
we took in our career,” he said. “But it ended
up being the biggest payoff as well.”
OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 147
 The Dollar Done Fell
at the Checkerboard Lounge
W
hen I entered the University of
Chicago in the fall of 1980 to
pursue my master’s in English,
my first class was Introduction
to Literary Study, taught by
Ned Rosenheim, author of the book What
Happens in Literature (1961). As I sat there
with my sharpened
pencils, I readied my
mind for details about
philological arcana.
For the whole of that
session and the next,
Professor Rosenheim
discussed the wonders
of Chicago, with the ex-
plicit instruction to get
out of Hyde Park: Visit
the Art Institute, the
Lyric Opera, Wrigley
Field, the Steppenwolf
Theatre, Frank Lloyd
Wright’s Oak Park.
Don’t let your gradu-
ate years be circum-
scribed by the campus,
as glorious as it is, he
insisted. I took this to
heart and did all those
things, as well as seeing
Walter Payton at Soldier Field (in single-digit
temperatures), attending a Second City im-
prov show, eating a cheeseburger at the Billy
Goat Tavern, and drinking a martini at the
Palmer House. One of my most memorable
excursions was also one of the closest to the
Hyde Park campus (about ten blocks away)
but transported me back to the South: the
Checkerboard Lounge at 423 E. 43rd Street.
It was well known to U. of C. students and
we gathered a group to go. I don’t remember
who played that night (my only trip there),
but the atmosphere was one of homey wel-
come. (One piece of advice I was given:
Get your beer right away because prices
increased by seventy-five percent once the
148 WINTER 2021
BY Jay Jennings
music started, from $1 to $1.75.) I recall that sity of Illinois at Chicago, spending thirty
at the entrance was a card table, on which years there and publishing sixteen books,
a cash box swallowed our $1 admission, an including Home/Bass (2013), which won an
absurd amount for the quality of the mu- American Book Award. He has spent most of
sic, a blues master performing almost every the waking hours of his adult life listening
night: Buddy Guy, who founded the club in to, thinking about, and writing on the blues,
1972 with L. C. Thurman; Guy’s sometime which to his thinking is the crucial Ameri-
can art form. “Nothing
that Richard Wright
wrote is as authentic
as the blues,” he told
me recently. “Nothing.”
In 2019, he was given
the Fuller Award for
Lifetime Achievement
from the Poetry Foun-
dation and the Chicago
Literary Hall of Fame;
the cover of the pro-
gram for that honor
shows him sitting out-
side the Checkerboard,
such was his ubiquity
there and at other
music venues.
“The Checkerboard,”
he said, “was a blues
club but it was also a
living cultural institu-
tion…the school where
collaborator Junior Wells, harpist supreme; the masters performed….More importantly, it
Muddy Waters; Lefty Dizz; James Cotton. was almost like a training ground for young
Once we were in the door, a woman with an musicians. What do I mean? Junior Wells,
aluminum pan offered us some spaghetti. James Cotton, Lefty Dizz would often call
The narrow room was divey and intimate, these young people up to let them play at the
a juke joint on a city thoroughfare. If it was end of the night.” He pauses and laughs. “But
Blue Monday, it’s likely that poet Sterling then again, most of the time they wouldn’t
Plumpp was there, too. call you up.”
Plumpp, a native of Clinton, Mississippi, It is clear that we’re talking mostly about
was raised by his grandparents, sharecrop- the “old” Checkerboard. Even in its early
pers whom he often worked alongside. An days, there were a large number of white
outstanding student, he attended college in people like me and my graduate-student
Kansas and moved to Chicago in 1962, where cohort in attendance. The Guy and Thurman
some relatives lived and where he took a job partnership ended in 1985, and the latter
at the post office while writing poetry. He moved the club to Hyde Park in 2005, closer
went on to join the faculty at the Univer- to the university. (It closed for good after
Checkerboard Lounge, 423 E. 43rd St., Chicago, May 30, 1977. Photo by Jonas Dovydenas courtesy the
Chicago Ethnic Arts Project collection (AFC 1981/004), American Folklife Center, Library of Congress
Thurman’s death in 2015.) Other clubs where the traditions were
passed down—as Muddy Waters had done with Guy at the 708 Club, PL AYLI ST
shortly after Guy moved to Chicago—had already either closed
or moved; Plumpp specifically names Theresa’s and Peppers. The
contemporary crop of “white-tourist clubs,” as Plumpp calls them,
lack the pedagogical legacy of the old South Side venues. “I don’t A BRIEF
know whether you can apprentice yourself by sitting in. Although
the shows are good.” HISTORY
My one trip to the Checkerboard in 1981 was sandwiched between
two notable recorded performances there. In 1979, Guy tracked a
live album, The Dollar Done Fell, released in 1980 and reissued on
OF
CD in 1988 under the title Live at the Checkerboard Lounge; later in
1981, the Rolling Stones, in town for a multi-night arena show, visited
BOUNCE
the club and jammed with Muddy Waters, Guy, and others. After BY
years as a bootleg, the show was released as a CD and DVD in 2012,
and selected performances can be found on the Stones’ YouTube BIG
channel. Legend has it that it was an impromptu appearance by the
band at the club to see Waters, but there’s plenty of evidence, by
FREEDIA
reporting and by common sense observation of the videos, that it was
planned. No matter, both Waters and the Stones—with Mick Jagger
rocking a pastel-peach Ellesse tracksuit—revel in the performance,
the affection and delight running in both directions. By then they’d

had a long relationship with Waters, whom they revered, dating
from the mid-1960s, when they toured the South, playing for white
audiences early and at the juke joints after. As Keith Richards put it
in his autobiography, Life: “You want to be a blues player, the next
minute you fucking well are and you’re stuck right amongst them,
and there’s Muddy Waters standing next to you.”
Plumpp, who was not at the Checkerboard to see the Stones,
nevertheless felt his own affection for the British embrace of and
respect for the blues masters as opposed to American musicians’
appropriation and lack of acknowledgment. “They know vocal music
in Europe and they study it,” he said. “The Rolling Stones, they are
students of the craft of it. The thing that I respect them the most
for: they said there’s no way in the world I’m going to sing [on TV’s
Shindig!] if you don’t put Howlin’ Wolf in front of me. I never heard
Elvis Presley say that.”
I’m not sure Ned Rosenheim ever went to the Checkerboard,
but his injunction to get off the Hyde Park campus sent me there
(even if I was so absent from campus I once missed a reception for
Seamus Heaney). My professor had a counterpart at UIC in Plumpp,
who frequently encouraged his students, like future writers Jeffery
Renard Allen and Tyehimba Jess, to accompany him to clubs like
the Checkerboard. Allen wrote of his teacher, “Clubs are Sterling’s
woodshed, immersion in the music the necessary preparation for
making.” Plumpp himself has an even more expansive view of the
value of his nights out at the clubs. Going to blues and jazz venues,
he says, “is the only way you can get a deep understanding of what
African American culture is.”
My master’s thesis was on Dr. Johnson’s “Life of Milton,” and in
general I played out that year along a well-trod path of traditional
academic achievement and indulged my Anglophilic desire to es-
cape my Arkansas upbringing. But at the Checkerboard, and in
my subsequent reading of fellow Arkansan Robert Palmer’s Deep
Blues published the same year, I felt a nascent interest in and ap-
preciation for artistic expression that was more vital and closer
to home—I should have been studying Robert Johnson and Little
Milton instead.
F
or those who don’t know, Bounce music is a call-and-response
form of hip-hop played over a hyper-fast beat, a genre born in
my city of New Orleans. It can sound like rap; it can sound like
EDM. But as long as it has the Triggerman beat, it’s Bounce!
Bounce can be traced back to DJ Jubilee. In 1993, he re-
leased the track “Jubilee All” on cassette, which marked the first hit
Bounce track and, as a fun piece of trivia, the first recorded song with
the word “twerk” in it! In the meantime, artists like Partners-N-Crime,
Ms. Tee, Mia X, and Cheeky Blakk were circulating on the scene as
well. Between 1998 and 2001, Bounce exploded into the stratosphere
when artists like Master P, Mystikal, and Juvenile put their twist on the
genre with songs like “Souljas” (Master P), “Danger (Been So Long)”
(Mystikal feat. Nivea), and “Back That Azz Up” (Juvenile feat. Lil Wayne
and Mannie Fresh). They got huge record deals and dominated the
radio nationwide for close to a decade.
At that time, me and other queer artists like Katey Red and Sissy
Nobby were starting to hit the clubs, me as a back-up singer for Katey
(until eventually I went out on my own). It was in 2005, when Hurri-
cane Katrina damn near killed us all, that our brand of Bounce ended
up spreading all over the South. Everyone got displaced. I moved to
Houston, and I needed some income, so I started booking shows there.
There were lots of other people from New Orleans in Houston too, so
there was a big demand for shows. These performances brought us
together and were a form of healing.
Today, of course, you can hear elements of Bounce in N.E.R.D.
and Rihanna’s “Lemon” and Drake’s “In My Feelings.” It’s always an
honor that the music I love so much has had an impact on icons like
Beyoncé and Drake, with some of their biggest hits referencing these
classic Bounce songs!
Scan the code within the Spotify app or visit
Oxford American Magazine on Spotify to stream the playlist.

Photo by Brad Hebert. Courtesy Simon & Schuster, Big Freedia: God Save the Queen Diva! OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 149

A
fricans have been putting “groove”
into improvisational music since
before the forefather slave owners
of these United States disenfran-
chised them as human beings in
the Declaration of Independence, the Bill
of Rights, and laws ever since. The Ameri-
can “blues” routes have gone from the Deep
South upward through the Underground
Railroad, the Great Migration, forced re-
settlement, and on, as you know. What I’m
calling “blues” here is the massive bucket of
a term for the musical genre that promises
resilience in the face of hardship.
The great Q, Quincy Jones, was a kid in
Chicago during the early 1940s—he was born
there in 1933. In his biography Q, his child-
hood friend Lucy Jackson recounts play-
ing jazz and more on the piano with young
Quincy in her house. Still, the music was
not his primary concern; that was idolizing
the gangsters his dad carpentered for, and
acting like a hoodlum, and then gangster-
izing the hood. Quincy may have heard jazz
on the radio, coming out of clubs, but
more important, as “Little Lucy” recounts,
were pint-sized thefts, like stealing water-
melons and “put[ting] a hurtin’ on that
melon” in the vacant lot that served as
their ballpark. Quincy was tiny, but he
and his younger brother Lloyd “ran with
gangs and from gangs.” Music, in the back-
ground, on 78s, on Lucy’s piano, would
later become an infatuation, his solace, his
center, only after his dad moved the family
as far away from the South as possible: to
Sinclair Heights, forty minutes north of
Seattle, after finding a job at the Puget
Sound Naval Shipyard.
T here is a Southern influence to Q’s ca-
reer. Still, you might not be able to
define how or what that is, since Quincy
excels at creating, producing, arranging,
managing, directing just about any genre
you may want to discuss. Look at his dis-
cography, filmography. Look at his awards
150 WINTER 2021
BY Terence Blanchard
and honors. Those go on for forty-three pages
at the end of his biography. In small font. His
filmography includes television appearances
featuring cameos with Puffy, Wu-Tang, Di-
ana Ross, and Michael Jackson—not at the
same time, but wouldn’t that have been an
interesting twist on a We Are the World, Part
Deux? You may ask, as I often do, shaking my
head: How can Quincy do everything great?
Exceptionally great?
And here is what I think. I found it in Q’s
bio as well. It is a quote forged by his father:
a Black man, a man of few emotions and
words—at least to his kids, and not when
the belt was needed—like so many others of
that generation, duty-bound while oppressed
by circumstance and racial injustice and
forever in poverty, paid minuscule wages
for backbreaking work. Q’s father, also a
Quincy, was raised in the South, Lake City,
South Carolina; maybe. Q was never sure.
“Once a task is just begun, never leave it
till it’s done. Be the labor great or small, do
it well or not at all.”
The quote seems straight from the lives of
the dirt-poor who needed youngsters to get
the work done and done right. No time for a
second chance, a redo. Focus. Do it right. And
Q found out just how dirt-poor his grand-
mother was when he and his brother were
deposited there in Louisville, Kentucky, after
his mother’s breakdown, when Q was just
seven years old. Their grandmother taught
them to catch and kill rats. That was dinner,
sometimes. Waste nothing, as “she had noth-
ing to waste.”
Focus and use everything. The concept of
doing it right and putting the work in to get
it right seems to be the through line of Q’s
career. This has to be how he has succeeded
with almost everything musical placed under
his care.
My father, Joseph Oliver Blanchard, sold
insurance by day and sang opera at night. He
was a music lover who enjoyed all types of
music. He always encouraged me to aspire
to the highest level of perfection. When-
ever Oscar Peterson played on television,
he would scream, “Come here, boy, and
listen to this!”
And family. Family is a big part of Quin-
cy—yes, ever-growing due to divorces and,
well, anything snarky you may want to say
leave it out there, but family, related and
extended, blood and crony, friendships
held together by a love of music. Q’s musi-
cal influence is broad and deep because of
the family he has gathered around him and
nurtured since he left Seattle for Boston
and Berklee.
Quincy’s family and many low-income
families (of all colors) in those decades
were whirlpools of chaos: no money for
anything outside of food, and then per-
haps not even nourishing. Too many living
under one roof, if that, in sub-standard
housing ghettoized from the more affluent
whites and, maybe by design, no safety
nets. Q’s house was all negative energy,
pulling, not pushing. His dad was distant,
his stepmom antagonistic, his mother, not
Quincy Jones, 1959 © Album/Alamy
there physically and psychologically. There
was no there to hang on to.
One day, peering into Dick Green’s Cafe,
a jook joint in Sinclair Heights his daddy
told him to stay away from, the music “hit
my heart so hard,” Q said. “Washed over me
with such a beautiful force, that I’d spend the
next fifty-five years trying to get back to it.…
There was a family in there. A family gettin’
down. I knew I belonged there.”
One fateful day, at the age of fourteen, I
ventured out to play a gig in the Ninth Ward
of New Orleans. I was in the horn section of an
r&b band of grown-ass men. All of the older
women thought I was so cute because I looked
like a baby. The older guys propped me up
with a beer to make me look like I belonged.
They told me, “Don’t drink it, hold it.” On the
break of the show, as the house music began
to play, the song stopped all of a sudden and I
heard an announcer say, “Terence Blanchard,
your father is at the front door.” That was
the end of the night for me and almost my
music career. My father wanted to put me in
boarding school. I shuddered to think about
boarding school. I knew I wanted to be with
those amazing musicians who played with
soul and feeling.
Family is also the center of my life—a con-
stant in my music career of variables. Family
and friends help me navigate the difficult
balance between relationships and my art.
They inspire and focus my restless mind.
They ground me when I lose my footing.
Q, my fellow Piscean brother, has always
been inspiring when I see him. He embraces
me like family. And like family, he is quick
to point out that his favorite arrangement
of mine is one of his film themes from The
Pawnbroker. Q telling me anything? Abso-
lutely priceless.
Traveling north during the Great Migra-
tion was to place the horrors of the South far
behind, but Paradise was hard to find in the
North unless you discovered drugs, alcohol,
sex, the VICES. Or wrapped yourself in the
teachings of the Bible and the Golden Rule.
Or, you found sustenance, as Q did when
he discovered a piano in a deserted rec hall.
Joy. His addiction. Here he found a “feeling
so good I couldn’t let go of it.” A paradise
built by creating harmony, melody, notes,
chords, and swing out of the dregs of your
life. The great jazz musician Art Blakey used
to tell me all the time, “Music washes away
the dust of everyday life.” I think Q and I
would agree about the exfoliating powers
of a twelve-bar blues.
Photo © Pavielle Garcia
PL AYLI ST
SPRING
BREAK
SOUNDTRACK
BY
LEON BRIDGES
I
grew up in a religious household, but make no mistake, it was a musical household. In addi-
tion to gospel and worship music, I was always exposed to something good on the speakers;
my father was really into Otis Redding and Curtis Mayfield, and my mother was into Anita
Baker and Sade. I was a teenager in the early ’00s, so radio was a gold mine for me—when
my mom was at work, I had Usher and Dru Hill fired up and blasting.
All my family lineage is from New Orleans; I was born in Atlanta and then moved to Fort Worth,
Texas, where I was raised and live now, and there has always been so much pride in being from
the South, as there should be. Music is inherent to the South—seriously, think of your favorite
towns in the region and tell me that an incredible artist didn’t come from each and every one of
those places. Music is how we tell stories and move the culture forward, how we gather. When I
think about music in the South, I think of the five hundred thousand folks who assemble in New
Orleans for Essence Festival every year, the always crowded swap meets in Dallas with the DJs
and the playlists and all the tunes that pour forth from the speakers, the industry draw of Atlanta
and homecoming weekends at the HBCUs.
When the Oxford American asked me to celebrate Southern music, I was almost overwhelmed.
How do I select only a few songs to celebrate the greatness? Where do I even start? I’m not a music
ethnographer, and really you could argue that all music is inspired by and draws from the South.
And then it came to me: Virginia Beach.
For anyone who has ever read an interview of mine, you will know that Ginuwine is forever one
of my heroes. If you lived through the ’00s with BET and a radio, then you know that Ginuwine
was always doing shows in Virginia Beach, especially around spring break time. The footage from
those concerts looked so fun, especially for a teen stuck at home with little money. It made me
interested in the area, which seemed to have a ton of talent—like that guy Pharrell who was on
the radio with that new song “Frontin’.”
In 2019, Pharrell—the one and only and now my labelmate—held the Something in the Water
festival in his home area of Virginia Beach. The lineup was sick, with acts such as Travis Scott,
Migos, Janelle Monáe, SZA, Rosalía, Anderson .Paak, and Jhené Aiko, and the footage reminded
me of all of those classic r&b concerts I saw back in the day. I was slated for 2020 but sadly due
to COVID it didn’t happen. I hope to someday take the stage there.
The greater Virginia Beach region is or was home to so many inspirational artists—Ella Fitzgerald,
Clipse, Missy Elliott, Timbaland. Let’s be honest, to this day, musicians are trying to come close to
even a fraction of what these icons have achieved in the studio: magic. Here are some tunes from
Virginia Beach artists that move my soul. Let it warm up. I hope you enjoy, preferably on a dancefloor
or around a kitchen table with friends or loud in your car. You know, like we do down South.
Scan the code within the Spotify app or visit Oxford American Magazine on Spotify to stream the playlist.
OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 151
 Sculpting the Epic Hero in Sound
A
bove my desk is the “A Great Day
in Harlem” photograph (1958). I
stare at it all the time, am grad-
ually programmed by its every
gesture. Mary Lou Williams is
one of two women among the cast of jazz
heroes pictured there. She’s standing in
the front row between a self-consciously
dapper Thelonious Monk and an elegantly
leaning Marian McPartland. Williams holds a
cigarette absentmindedly, mid-conversation
with McPartland, looks at her instead of
the camera. What camera, what impending
fame? The lighthearted but deeply effective
subversiveness of her looking away from the
camera and toward her friend is integral
to Williams’s music, her sound, her under-
stated charisma and grace. From here, right
around this time, Williams was brave enough
to take a break. She had been recording
for around twenty years by 1958. I begin
with her turning around because Mary Lou
Williams is a master of attentive digression.
Her hiatus was earned and meditative and
152 WINTER 2021
BY Harmony Holiday
another way she would turn away without
missing a thing.
B L A C K B E AT I T U D E
I n 1964 Mary Lou Williams broke a prolonged
silence with the release of a tribute to the
first black Catholic saint, St. Martin de Por-
res, who had been beatified in 1962—a healer,
son of a former slave, and patron of “racial
harmony” born in the Viceroyalty of Peru
in the sixteenth century. Black Christ of the
Andes was born, recorded in October of 1963.
A black saint who at the time may have been
called a Negro saint or sacrosanct, in the U.S.,
and exiled from his own kingdom, became the
muse of a black genius pianist, marginalized
herself by gender and by the sheer power of
her talent, which likely left people in the kind
of hypocritical stupor of misrecognition that
many women who can keep up with or exceed
their male counterparts face. Nonetheless,
Williams did not walk around exuding entitle-
ment or resentment; instead she was driven
Mary Lou Williams at home in New York City with (left to right) Dizzy Gillespie, Tadd Dameron, and
Jack Teagarden, c. Aug. 1947. Photo by William P. Gottlieb courtesy the Library of Congress
and fiercely committed to authentic artistic
evolution, rejecting received forms for the
ones she could invent and reinvent herself.
She even questioned the tropes of the cult of
bebop. Black Christ was the testimony this
moment in her life demanded. The album is
an autonomous world deserving of its own
cinema. As you hear it, you see it expand like
a plot, moving swiftly from saint to sinner to
narrating, gossiping chorus and back, a tour of
the black psychic attachment to faith and the
miraculous and the undermining doubt and
cathartic decadence that lurk on the threshold
of that faith.
Mary Lou Williams was born in Atlanta,
Georgia, in 1910, and raised in Pittsburgh,
Pennsylvania. She left home early with a
traveling band and was quickly noticed and
chosen by band leaders, the first being John
Williams, who became her first husband. Early
in her recording career, on the way to a session
with the Andy Kirk Band, traveling alone by
train, she was raped by the train’s conductor.
She arrived at the session and recorded “Nite
Life” (1930) without skipping a beat or an
appointment. Such was her striking amalgam
of stoicism and emotional power. To avoid
internalizing the discrimination that came
with her position, she objectified herself in
song and dealt with it there. She rejected overt
protest music in a similar manner, repudiat-
ing her own possible scapegoats. As if she
considered protest songs to be opportunistic
caricatures of real struggle or distractions
from the real work of creating a more beauti-
ful world through music; she was not wrong
in her suspicions nor was she ostentatious or
castigating about them. She did demonstrate
her feelings and exorcise her demons in her
sound. Even though she was not making bla-
tant protest music, she made some of the most
demonstratively freedom-seeking music of her
time and documented her feelings about racial
justice through essay and journal writing while
omitting them from her music.
Black Christ of the Andes arriving a year
before the Voting Rights Act is the closest Mary
Lou Williams comes to divulging her protest
in song. She achieves this through building a
mythic world wherein good and evil battle for
the soul, and saints and martyrs are shackled
to the world’s energetic turmoil to embody
and transcend it. This album comes from her
subconscious and enters the listener’s like a
subliminal call to duty, urging those who hear
it for what it is to embody the archetypes it
offers. In her capacity for myth-building Wil-
liams is similar to Sun Ra, who, that same year,
recorded Other Planes of There. Its final song,
“Spiral Galaxy,” goes beyond calling for a new
creed by demanding a new morphogenic field
for blackness to inhabit. They both want us
traveling, moving on, getting somewhere else
through the fundamental tones of total pres-
ence. With Black Christ, Williams marks her
territory and occupies it so well no one would
try to contest her or debunk her living myth.
This is spiritual music, religious music, with
the sharp authority of the most cerebral songs.
She is not just thinking about God and the devil
or good and evil, she is surrendering her gifts
to these forces in order to be changed and
therefore change her listening audience into
believers, at least for the duration of this album.
SHE AND THE DEVIL
W hen Mary Lou was a child, her mother
treated her, at times, as a taboo. Other
times, family members tied her to her bed
because she complained of persistent psychic
and spirit visions. She was abused for telling
the truth about what she witnessed. Maybe
that’s why she turned to religion and saints
over more literal declarations. Kids do see
ghosts. She learned early in life that seeing
too much put her in danger, and testimony
was safer in code. She was a lifelong seer
and her gifts came with torments. No one
recording in 1964 was more equipped to
give us a new black myth in the codes of an
ancient belief system than someone who had
always been a witness.
There are three or four pillars on the album
that feel to me like the stages of this epic tale
through song. First comes our saint, doomed
to black sanctity in a world that will surely de-
file it. He is introduced with slow immaculate
choral lyrics that speak of his good deeds: he
sheltered each unsheltered child… he healed
the sick, raised the dead. Long, pensive pauses
between each deed mourn him as they honor
him. Then, suddenly, he transmutes sainthood
and becomes Black Christ of the Andes, our
epic hero for the remainder of the album.
The song quickens and Williams interjects
and joins him with a striding sound, a strut
on the keys that is so percussive it gives the
formerly rigid chorus a swinging hum. There’s
fun to be had within the humility and healing,
and some outrageous urge to break through
sanctity using its tools. Then back to lamenting
his sacrifices, and with shrill upward-spiraling
moans of praise, the song ends in a coil of man
surmounting himself.
The hipness of the version of “It Ain’t Nec-
essarily So” that follows on the record is
Williams’s way of avenging those sacrifices.
The strutting resumes. The Good Book is in
question, is in need of revision, the stories
you’re liable to read in the Bible, it ain’t
necessarily so, the piano inflects wordlessly.
A tone poem for rebels and worshippers to
share, Williams’s version carries the sound
of shedding; like old skin or like tears, her
playing drops and splits, then jolts back into
assured control. She swings so well on this
song that her range of motion fills the air with
the ache of injustice. How can anyone swing
like this and survive it? How can anyone tell
such secrets with no words?
Here comes “The Devil,” a song for him, his
energy, his antics, his frolic, his visitations,
his gender, his jury out. This is really a poem
haunted by sin’s interminable ghost. It exists
in the realm of Nina Simone’s version of “Sin-
nerman” for how it reminds us that there’s no
escaping the temptation of a so-called evil.
When you look him in the eye, the devil looks
a lot like you and me… it confesses, and here
comes Mary Lou, soloing in a laughing tone,
giggling about the devils she’s known. She is
no stranger to temptation herself, sometimes
by men, sometimes as a gambling addiction,
similar afflictions.
The answer to how can anyone swing like
that is by swinging like that, knowing and liv-
ing both sides, and constantly working to reaf-
firm and choose what is, or what feels, right.
DIRGE BLUES
A fter some upbeat hues comes our “Dirge
Blues.” The portion of the myth devoted
to the living dead, skeletal and embroiled
with indulgent pain, this composition feels
like Williams’s message to her peers. Jazz
music was a killer, a potentially lethal road
to bliss and triumph. It came with a lifestyle
that few emerged from unscathed. Here she
marches the collective scarring off stage and
loops and trembles it into the grace of retreat
with these blues. This is her polite way of
saying “don’t let this life destroy you, let
the music uplift you before you let it devour
you,” while at the same time showing all
the ways it will devour and kill and rename.
Williams is a master of tonal contradiction.
She swerves from the dirge to a “A Fungus
Among Us,” from performative sorrow to
humor. This composition is allegro rumbles
of exiling what has exiled us, a cleansing
speed, which as it accelerates leaves behind
what cannot keep up—trauma, overthink-
ing, funeral marching. Much of Williams’s
style is refusal to be possessed—by the over-
simplicity of popular styles of protest music,
by the stubbornness of bebop, and even by
the expectations of just one God.
The album ends with a rollicking honk,
almost rap, absolute sermon—horns, drums,
and shouting accented by Williams’s most coy
playing yet. She retreats and makes space for
her hero: come holy spirit, in nature one, with
both the Father and the Son, shed forth Thy
grace within our breast, and dwell with us, a
ready guest, and so on, and tambourines, and
everybody clap your hands, and unabashed
finale-ing, like fleeing the devastation of
mythic obscurity for the histrionic chaos of
becoming real again. Black Christ is our re-
introduction to Mary Lou Williams after she
stepped away from the public. She returns
saved, yet somehow more vulnerable than
before, beatified and disgraced like any great
black musician. This version of her looks
into the camera and walks past it wearing
God’s smirk.
OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 153
 O A C U LT U R A L G U I D E

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 O A C U LT U R A L G U I D E

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T
here’s something about siblings in
Black music-making—the Jackson
5, Michael and Janet, K-Ci and JoJo,
the Isley Brothers, Solange and Be-
yoncé, VanJess, Aretha and Carolyn.
When raised in the same house and hav-
ing lived through your formative years hip
to hip, no one comes close to knowing you
quite as well as the person who grew into
your clothes. It’s impossible to look away
when watching a family share a stage to-
gether, and you wonder if the choreography
is rehearsed, intuitive, or a little bit of both.
When Ernie and Ronald Isley took the virtual
stage during their VERZUZ performance
alongside Earth, Wind & Fire, there was a
synchronicity to their movements. Ernie,
158 WINTER 2021
BY Tarisai Ngangura
a gifted percussionist and guitar maestro,
layered his complex and bombastic riffs in
such a way that when his brother came in
with his buttery smooth vocals, they seam-
lessly rode above the instrumentation. And
Ronald never missed a beat; flexing his range
at the right moment and anticipating Ernie’s
musical direction with innate precision. Even
via a screen, their symbiotic relationship is
apparent. It carries the experience of having
made music together since childhood and
the trust that grows when two people are
raised to follow and lead each other. Look-
ing beyond performance, to siblings who
also write for each other, you’ll find an even
more mesmerizing relationship, with higher
professional and personal stakes.
Carolyn Franklin (seated) with her sister Aretha, recording at Atlantic Records, December 1967. © David Gahr/Getty Images
It’s something I have thought about the
dozens of times I’ve listened and relistened
to “Ain’t No Way”—sung by the late Aretha
Franklin, written by her younger sister, the
late Carolyn Franklin. I return to the song
because it reminds me of some of the most
vulnerable moments in the landscape of
Black art; the first verse makes me think of
the fractured, heavy love between Ruby Dee
and Sidney Poitier in A Raisin in the Sun.
When I hear the slow percussion, I envision
Zimbabwean actress Jesesi Mungoshi as the
titular character in the film Neria, struggling
to stay upright after the sudden death of her
husband. And as the song continues, I think
of the women written by Gayl Jones, Vievee
Francis, and Toni Morrison, from bits and
pieces and flashes of women they knew. Then
I think of the women I know. That singular
song is the score to a never-ending tapestry
of film, prose, poetry, and people that in-
forms my art, because its lyrics witness and
hold so much memory.
For a vocalist whose oeuvre is bursting at
the seams with tracks on redemptive love,
broken love, and love in the godly sense,
“Ain’t No Way” holds prime place as being
especially naked, emotionally tortured, and
deceptively revelatory beyond the well-trod
scope of love-me-back pleading. The melody
is as exquisite as the lyrics are laden with
dread and an extraordinary hope for reci-
procity. It doesn’t seem too much of a leap
to posit that the song is different because the
writer was different. She wasn’t a stranger
who became a collaborator, but a sister who
had always been a companion.
T he piano and horn arrangements at the
start of the track are lithe in their intro-
duction of a heartbreak ballad. They sound
like drifting nostalgia, and it’s when listening
to the first words that listeners realize: this
is a song for a moment. The moment that
finds you wondering whether love must con-
tinue or come to a smoldering, ash-filled end.
Carolyn wrote this song for Aretha’s smash
1968 album, Lady Soul, her third album for
Atlantic (and twelfth album overall), and it
was a dual breakthrough, showcasing the
talents of a fierce songwriter and the heart-
ache of an immensely private diva.
Throughout her life, Aretha rarely spoke
of the men she loved and skillfully found
ways to maneuver questions about her own
personal life back to something universal—
part of a life lived and “experienced.” Hav-
ing carved a barrier between her private
life and her public persona early on in her
career, it’s clear that the only person who
would ever come close to knowing how love
bruised Aretha was her sister. On “Ain’t No
Way,” in the soaring choral arrangement of
the refrain, and the slow build from almost
whispered confession to desperate pleading,
listeners hear snatches of how Aretha might
have loved. They also hear pockets of how
Carolyn wanted to be loved, delivered by
someone whose voice, at its best, could come
close to resurrecting what was once dead.
This was not the first song that Carolyn
wrote for her sister, but it was the one that
raised her profile as a writer who knew how
to spin gold from the most uneasy feelings
that come when falling in love, and that gave
Listen to “Carolyn’s Alchemy,” an accompanying
playlist by Tarisai Ngangura, while you read.
remarkable softness, clarity, and strength
to music’s most overused muse. She wrote
about love as someone who had observed
it transform those around her. Standing on
the periphery she saw the paths taken in
the name of love, whether driven by lack of
good choices, or not enough bravery. Some
writers have made tentative assumptions
about Carolyn’s own life, calling “Ain’t No
Way” a queer love song for a somewhat clos-
eted semi-visible artist. According to her
sister, Erma Franklin, in an interview with
journalist David Ritz, Carolyn loved women
and never hid that fact. “She went her own
way, lived her own life, and found freedom
in her individuality. She had no shame about
her sexual preference and spoke the unvar-
nished truth.”
Having come of age in an era of free love
for everyone but Black folks, Carolyn’s inti-
mate truth was likely one she had to delicate-
ly balance between the meteoric visibility of
her older sister and the staunch religious out-
look of C. L. Franklin, her revered, preacher
father—even as she confidently claimed it.
Distressingly, chances are high that had Caro-
lyn’s queerness been widely publicized it
would have garnered even greater backlash
than the reality of her preacher father, C. L.
Franklin, fathering a child with a twelve-
year-old member of his congregation when
the family lived in Memphis—a fact that’s
all the more pernicious when considering
Aretha’s own experiences with motherhood
at the same age. It’s a part of her life whose
pain is understood only in her unwavering
resistance to speak of that time or name any
of the people involved in a situation that was
likely coercive. Her sisters, especially Caro-
lyn, might have been the only ones she told
the full truth. The ones who saw everything as
it unfolded, simultaneously carving room for
the unnerving truth of their own father’s sins.
Although singing back-up for Aretha—
most memorably on the revamped “Re-
spect”—granted Carolyn greater mobility
as an artist, it also made her path to soloist
so much narrower. “People won’t let me out
of her shadow and I think that’s wrong,” she
said in a 1976 interview with the Ann Arbor
Sun. “We have different sounds and styles. I
have to live for myself,” she added. Songwrit-
ing was her independence when a solo career
failed to flourish after numerous false starts.
Her songs suffered from botched releases and
recording contracts so bad she called one
“the second-worst contract” she’d ever seen.
The pivot to focusing on her writing skills was
Scan the code within the Spotify app or visit Oxford
American Magazine on Spotify to stream the playlist.
not only a matter of self-preservation, but an
avenue for her to step into the foreground.
She was central even though she wasn’t vis-
ible, and we hear her words on tracks like
“Angel,” “Don’t Catch the Dog’s Bone” (for
the B-side of her sister Erma’s 1967 release),
and “Save Me,” also covered by Nina Sim-
one. “Angel” is particularly remarkable for
Aretha’s spoken word at the beginning of the
song, where she momentarily lets her guard
down and grants listeners access to her con-
versation with Carolyn. Those few seconds
see Aretha settled in and at home, retelling
a special moment, unvarnished, without the
gloss that often accompanies celebrity anec-
dotes of their creative process. That ease of
expression and desire to reveal seem to be a
through line in Aretha’s collaborations with
Carolyn. I don’t know whose idea it was to
include that intro, but Carolyn being named
and Aretha performing in a state of rarefied
vulnerability lend the song a personal place
in the pantheon of Black myth-making.
I got a call the other day
It was my sister Carolyn, saying,
“Aretha, come by when you can…”
And when I got there, she said,
“You know rather than go through a
long drawn out thing
I think the melody on the box will help
me explain.”
Letting listeners in on a myth, “Angel”
gives a glimpse of the work that goes into
craft, and spotlights the family members who
help in the building. Over a half century later,
Carolyn’s words continue to take on new life
as they leave the mouths of Black women who
embody both spirit and melancholy. They
have taken on a life larger than the artist
who shaped the classics, a testament to her
ability to be the woman for everywoman.
“A in’t No Way” was Whitney Houston’s
favorite song, and she shared this be-
fore breaking into its first verse during a 1994
concert in Philadelphia, a stop on her strenu-
ous “The Bodyguard World Tour.” Two years
after she starred in the film with the same
name, the soundtrack had made Houston the
biggest star in the world, evidenced by sold-
out shows in North America, Europe, and
Asia. When she sang the song in Philly, she
left its original backing vocals, performed by
her mother Cissy Houston. Her performance
felt familiar and stripped down, different
from the one she would give in 1997, and
OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 159
again in 1999 at VH1’s Divas Live alongside
Mary J. Blige. The song landed with a new
weight each time she hit the stage. In 1997, it
was restrained but triumphant. With Blige,
it was explosive as two women both clad in
siren red, who’d scaled love’s pinnacles and
sunk into its valleys, came together to share
their version of a song that undoubtedly had
been a thread throughout their own musi-
cal lives, echoing in their childhood homes,
coming through their tour bus speakers, and
bleeding through their pens with language
that helped them create their own requiem
to love.
When Patti LaBelle sang the song at the
1993 Essence Awards during the Aretha
Franklin Tribute, she brought the soulful
rendering of an ecstatic preacher at the pul-
pit. Her version is tethered to nothing except
the push and pull of her vocal capacity, and
the swelling applause of a grateful crowd.
It’s LaBelle at her most inspired—expressive,
flamboyant, and entranced by the melodies
that gave her ample room to leave listeners
in a state of awe. The best storytellers in
Black music’s matrilineal generations have
approached Carolyn’s words and all have
done them justice, yet, intentionally or not,
the song also makes starry moments for those
who lend their voices in the shadows of the
spotlight. Cissy Houston’s “ouuuuuu’s” in the
background of the original version are argu-
ably some of the most memorable parts of
the song and linger long after Aretha is done.
Whitney’s backing vocalist was breathtaking
in 1997 as she harmonized while flatfooted,
unafraid to take control and be heard, de-
spite singing next to “The Voice.” The vocalist
wasn’t who the crowd had come to see, but
in that moment she imprinted her own soul’s
and r&b were a part of her education. Her
single “Deal with It,” released eight years
after she wrote “Ain’t No Way,” had strands
of funk and disco blending into the gospel in-
flections, and it’s an under-appreciated gem
that highlighted not only her vocal range,
but her dynamic alchemy that made listeners
hear different genres at the same time in her
compositions. It’s a skill that was apparent on
“Ain’t No Way,” which can seamlessly fit into
multiple genres, from r&b to soul.
In a grainy video documenting the process
of recording early versions, she is a captivat-
ing conductor as she modulates the tempo,
using her clapping hands like a scale mea-
suring just how low and high Aretha’s voice
should go. Carolyn asks for the famous fade
away that gives the song not an ending but
an uncertain resolution that listeners will
come back to time and time again, just to
see if they can hear it. In the moments that
she sings the song, her voice is light but firm,
without the supreme power of her sister, but
scarred and moving nonetheless. There is
also a moment in the video when she laughs,
unexpectedly, caught up in the euphoria of
being present in a space made possible by a
tenderness that compelled her to write what
would allow others to cry, heal, and soar.
“Ain’t No Way” makes stars out of those
who dare approach it. And from the sheer
SOLUTION TO CROSSWORD ON PAGE 168.
E E S E R E X Y
64
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B A D U
61
H R Y K A
58
force it requires, the grace it seeks in the
face of harm, and the faith it demands, it’s
a melody for Black women. It understands
how we love, are failed by love, will fight
for it, and still stand without it. Carolyn was
twenty-four when she wrote the song, already
privy to the volatility of the music industry
and the ways of the world against women who
looked like she did, and who clung fiercely
to their agency. For an artist who is devas-
tatingly underrated, it’s a strange turn of
events when she’s remembered only in the
voice of a woman she knew since girlhood,
one who became Queen of Soul in the same
year that “Ain’t No Way” was released. The
year 1968 saw Aretha release two albums
less than six months apart: Lady Soul and
Aretha Now. Between the two albums were
the groundbreaking hits “(You Make Me Feel
Like) A Natural Woman,” “Chain of Fools,”
“I Say a Little Prayer,” and “Ain’t No Way.”
Only one Franklin is a credited songwriter
on one of these tracks. Even with Aretha’s
unmatched talent, it still took a community
to help in her anointing, and in that space was
Carolyn writing words that ushered in her
sister’s coronation. Carolyn is remembered
because her sister is worshiped. That’s the
thing about siblings in Black music-making.
We see them all, even when only looking
at one.
S S T B
63 62
T Y R P O
60
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59
L
57 56 55

movements onto the song, receiving a little of R O D S L O G N D E E W S

the light that Carolyn’s words so graciously 54
S E L
53
I S M A
52
H A T B
51 50

offers to all. 49 48 47 46

I’ve often wondered what music Carolyn T H K N I G S D Y A L G

heard playing around her when she conjured
45 44 43 42
A R T Y P L E I B M O N
the song. Gospel is obvious, and with family 41 40 39

roots stretching back to the sharecropping V E N T I S T S F Y A W A

38 37 36 35
fields of Mississippi, blues would have found T E A S O A R E N M A R
their way into any place she called home. 34 33 32 31 30

Raised in Detroit, the city where Motown

L A C K F E R T A B R O
29 28 27 26
took its first breath right as she was stepping L K A S S T D P I A R
into her teens, Carolyn was introduced to the U S E D O U T
25
S M S
24
N
23
E T
rhythms of the label’s most popular groups, 22 21 20 19

many of whom were artists of her age, includ- K E T O M O N E I A S N I N

ing the Supremes, the Marvelettes, and the S C A R
18
E L S E
17
T E A R
16
I
Jackson 5. I also imagine that with guests like 15 14 13

Sarah Vaughan, B. B. King, and Nat King Cole I M P B A S S E S M C A

coming to her Detroit childhood home, jazz
12 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

160 WINTER 2021

 Through Darkness to Light
Photographs Along the Underground Railroad

November 19, 2021 - January 9, 2022

Through Darkness to Light: Photographs Along

the Underground Railroad features beautifully

dramatic color photographs and research by

Jeanine Michna-Bales, as well as ephemera and true

narratives that together tell the story of the

Underground Railroad.

The exhibit provides visitors with a small glimpse

of what the long road to freedom may have looked

like for 100,000 enslaved Americans in the

aMIZ[JMNWZM\PM+Q^QT?IZӊ[MVL

Come See Us in Orlando!

Top to Bottom: Hidden Passage, Mammoth Cave; Barren County, Kentucky, 2014,
Digital C-print, 32 inches x 43 inches, courtesy the artist

On the Way to the Hicklin House Station, San Jacinto, Indiana, 2013,
Digital C-print, 23 inches x 30 1/2 inches, courtesy the artist

900 E. PRINCETON ST. | ORLANDO, FL 32803 | WWW.MENNELLOMUSEUM.ORG |

Follow us on social media: @MennelloMuseum
 MUSIC
CREDITS
The Oxford American 2021 Up South Music Issue Sampler was compiled and produced
by Danielle A. Jackson and the Oxford American staff along with Andrew Rossiter
(ORG Music). It was manufactured by ORG Music and mastered by Mitch Rackin. Its
cover art and disc were designed by Carter/Reddy. The Oxford American believes
artists and craftspeople should be paid for their labor. We are grateful to the artists
and song rights holders who worked with our fee structures and, with their creativity,
enrich our lives daily. We have credited them here.
1. PRAISE THE LORD
MARY LOU WILLIAMS
Released in 1964, “Praise The Lord” closes pianist, composer, and theorist
Mary Lou Williams’s Black Christ of the Andes. The song and album signaled
a new era for Williams, who’d converted to Catholicism in the ’50s and would
go on to compose and lead “Mary Lou’s Mass” at St. Patrick’s Cathedral.
Born in Atlanta in 1910, Williams moved to Pittsburgh with her family as a
small child. Her earliest performances around town were at funerals, par-
ties, and a brothel. In the late ’20s, she joined Andy Kirk’s Twelve Clouds
of Joy, a touring Kansas City–style big band, and spent much of the swing
era working in Duke Ellington’s and Benny Goodman’s orchestras. When
jazz changed in the 1940s, she was there. She’d moved to Harlem’s Sugar
Hill neighborhood in 1943, and her apartment became a gathering space
for the musicians who were developing bebop. Dizzy Gillespie, Theloni-
ous Monk, and Bud Powell all looked to Williams for guidance, and their
innovations, in turn, made their way into her compositions. Black Christ
of the Andes synthesized the mysticism Williams expressed throughout
her life, her newfound faith, and her long-held belief in the wellspring of
Black music as portent and balm. “Praise The Lord” is raucous; rhythm—
delivered by bass, tambourines, drums, and Williams—foregrounds the
tune. Saxophone parts by Budd Johnson and a rousing, trickster-like vocal
by gospel singer Jimmy Mitchell trouble and dissolve the divide between
sacred and secular sound. As Harmony Holiday puts it in this issue: “She
swings so well on this song that her range of motion fills the air with the
ache of injustice. How can anyone swing like this and survive it?” Williams
teaches us that we cannot survive well without swinging.
WRITER: Mary Lou Williams PUBLISHING: Cecilia Music Publishing Co. (ASCAP), Administered by
Modern Works Music Publishing ARRANGED BY Melba Liston PERFORMED BY Mary Lou Williams
Stream the Up South
162 WINTER 2021 Music Issue Sampler.
COVER IMAGE: “Theresa's Lounge, 48th and Indiana, Chicago,
Illinois,” 1977, by Jonas Dovydenas. Courtesy the Chicago
Ethnic Arts Project collection (AFC 1981/004), American
Folklife Center, Library of Congress. CD FACE IMAGE: Jenny
Thompson - Adobe Stock
2. FORGET ME
Shirley Horn
A prolific vocalist and pianist, Shirley Horn famously ac-
companied her own lavish contralto on the keys, her com-
mand evident in the harmony of two exacting talents. “I
like a piano that can fight back,” she said in a 1989 profile.
“When I hit it I want it to hit me back.” Born and raised in
D.C., Horn drew the attention of Miles Davis with her debut
album, Ashes and Embers (1960), performing with him
before joining Quincy Jones at Mercury. Soon after, Horn
would take an extended hiatus to raise her daughter. She
released Softly in her fifties, in an era of her career marked
by global tours, a slew of Grammy nominations (and a 1998
win for Best Jazz Vocal Performance), and a Jazz Master
Fellowship, the highest honor awarded to U.S. jazz musi-
cians. “Forget Me” is a signature of the Taurean’s style:
sensitive, unwavering, and, above all, achingly romantic.
WRITER: Valerie Parks Brown PUBLISHING: Hampshire House
Publishing Corp. (ASCAP), Administered by TRO ESSEX MUSIC
GROUP PRODUCED BY Joel E. Siegel PERFORMED BY Shirley Horn
3. ST. LOST
Tonina
“St. Lost” is the title track on the second album from Tonina
Saputo, a St. Louis artist known for her arrangements
and covers of songs in English, Spanish, and Italian. The
track features intricately choreographed vocals, jumping
scales and stretching words like “loner” in the first verse
into a protracted plea. Born to a musical lineage, the self-
described folk musician grew up with a mix of Motown and
jazz greats like Nat King Cole, learning Spanish to emulate
her favorite Selena Quintanilla hits.
WRITER: Tonina Saputo PUBLISHING: Tonina Saputo
(BMI) ARRANGED BY Tonina Saputo PERFORMED BY Tonina
Scan the code within the Spotify app or visit Oxford
American Magazine on Spotify to stream the playlist.
 7. WHEELS
John Doe
John Doe needs no introduction; he’s
4. CHOPSTICKS omnipresent and omnitalented. From
L.A. by way of Illinois, Tennessee, and
DUKE ELLINGTON & Baltimore, the co-founder of the seminal
HIS ORCHESTRA punk band X, with whom he still tours,
has imprinted his artistry on a range of
creative genres—literary, musical, cin-
Under the direction of Duke Ellington, “Chopsticks,” ematic—and a range of genres within
composed in 1877 by sixteen-year-old Euphemia those genres. “Wheels” is a cover of a
Allen using the pen name Arthur de Lulli, bears song written by the similarly omnital-
little resemblance to the piece most beginner piano ented Particle Kid, the nom de smoke
students learn. Rather, what’s formally a waltz is plume of Willie Nelson’s son Micah. The
reimagined as a playful plunking piano tune that song was released on a split album on
which the two covered each other’s
gives way to a swinging big band jazz rendition.
songs. Doe’s version strips the track
Ellington, born in Washington, D.C., and perhaps
to its core and invests it with a gravity
best known for his weekly broadcast performances
that manages to convey both world-
from Harlem’s Cotton Club, was an expert at craft-
weariness and hopefulness.
ing dynamic orchestrations for short pieces like WRITER: Jacob Micah Nelson
this one, which was pressed on a 78 rpm along with PUBLISHING: Particle Kid LLC (BMI)
“Honeysuckle Rose.” PERFORMED BY John Doe
WRITER: Euphemia Allen PERFORMED BY Duke Ellington & His
Orchestra 8. TWO TRAINS
Little Feat
Named for lead singer Lowell George’s
small feet (and borrowing the odd spell-
ing of the Beatles’ band name), the
Southern California–based band Little
5. GENERATION Y Feat released their third studio album,
Courtney Bryan Dixie Chicken, in 1973 with a style based
Contemporary composer Courtney Bryan arranges music for solo perfor- heavily on New Orleans r&b. “Two Trains”
mances, orchestras, chamber ensembles, and as accompaniment for singers, is the second song on the album and
dancers, and visual art. An accomplished scholar as well as a musician, Bryan features George’s easy melody, Bonnie
incorporates elements of improvisational jazz, gospel, spirituals, and classical Raitt among its chorus of background
music into her work, which has been described as “bridging the sacred and vocalists, and the soft guitar that helped
the secular.” Steve Smith for the New Yorker wrote of the New Orleans native, define the new sound that would secure
“Courtney Bryan is skilled at spinning melodic lines that sing irresistibly.” A Little Feat’s place among legends.
perfect example of these enchanting lines can be found in “Generation Y.” WRITER: Lowell George PUBLISHING: Naked
WRITER: Courtney Bryan PUBLISHING: LIGHTOFMINEONLINE (ASCAP) Snake Music (ASCAP) PRODUCED BY Lowell
ARRANGED AND PERFORMED BY Courtney Bryan George PERFORMED BY Little Feat
6. DIDN’T IT RAIN (LIVE) 9. TOUCH THE SKY
Sister Rosetta Tharpe Black Pumas
“Didn’t It Rain,” a gospel standard, became a “race record” hit in 1947 for In his profile of Adrian Quesada in this
Arkansas-born Sister Rosetta Tharpe (with Marie Knight and the Sam Price issue, Jim Beaugez calls the producer
Trio). But here, as in most of her performances, Tharpe’s bravura turns and Black Pumas guitarist a “conserva-
with her guitar and voice break the bounds of categorization. Gayle F. Wald tor” of Chicano soul who takes seriously
writes in “From Spirituals to Swing” that Tharpe’s “charismatic guitar play- his responsibility for documenting the
ing and extroverted stage persona helped to establish what today we take evolution of the genre, as well as hip-hop
for granted as ‘rock’ convention,” and one can certainly hear (and see on and r&b in southern Texas. In “Touch the
YouTube clips) what Chuck Berry and others must have learned from her. Sky,” Quesada and vocalist Eric Burton
What’s inimitable, though, is her spirit. incorporate these elements into a groov-
TRADITIONAL /SPIRITUAL PERFORMED BY Sister Rosetta Tharpe ing, soulful melody that appears on their
164 WINTER 2021
eponymous first album. For more from
Quesada, see his curated playlist on our
Spotify profile.
WRITERS: Eric S. Burton and Adrian
Quesada PUBLISHING: EL DELUXE
MUSIC (ASCAP), EL DELUXE
MUSIC (BMI) PRODUCED BY Adrian
Quesada PERFORMED BY Black Pumas
10. WOLVES
(SONG OF THE
SHEPHERD’S DOG)
Iron & Wine
“Wolves (Song of the Shepherd’s Dog),”
from Iron & Wine’s third studio album,
would be easy to miss on first listen. It’s
one of the weirder songs on a record
that’s already a departure from Sam
Beam’s earlier work, music that tended
more toward stripped-down folk than the
heavily produced delivery heard here—
not to mention that the last two minutes
of the song are entirely instrumental.
The Shepherd’s Dog was Iron & Wine’s
last release with Sub Pop before depart-
ing briefly and eventually returning to
the label with triumphant hits such as
2017’s Beast Epic.
WRITER: Sam Beam PUBLISHING: SAM BEAM
MUSIC (BMI) PRODUCED BY Brian Deck and
Sam Beam PERFORMED BY Iron & Wine
11. STARE AT ME
Joi
Known for her genre-defying music,
Joi demands attention in her 2018
single “Stare at Me” with fuzzy elec-
tronic beats, gospel vocals, and a chorus
reminiscent of late-Nineties rock. “Lyri-
cally, it speaks on having your thoughts
hijacked,” Joi reveals on her website. “It’s
about the deep desire to be seen and
want to be on someone’s mind because
of this social media and digital obses-
sion we have.” Born in Nashville, Joi is
known for influencing the Atlanta music
scene in the ’90s and, as she writes in
this issue, “every audacious Black artist
in this country who has come after me
whether they know it or not.”
WRITERS: Joi Gilliam and Brook
D'leau PUBLISHING: Joilicious Music (BMI)
& ILLAV8R GOES UP (ASCAP) PRODUCED BY
Brook D'leau CO-PRODUCED BY Joi
WRITTEN, ARRANGED, AND PERFORMED BY Joi
12. SHOO-B-DOOP
AND COP HIM
Betty Davis
Betty Davis was born Betty Mabry in
1944 in Durham, North Carolina. With
her family, she moved to Pittsburgh
when she was twelve, and at seventeen,
she set out solo for New York to attend
the Fashion Institute of Technology. She
found work as a model and nightclub
manager while learning to write songs;
the Chambers Brothers cut an early
composition, “Uptown,” which she’d
written about Harlem. In 1968, the
songwriter married Miles Davis and
famously introduced him to the music
of Sly Stone and Jimi Hendrix. When
their marriage ended the following year,
she kept her married name and contin-
ued to write songs. She released her
self-titled debut in 1973, and They Say
I’m Different, its follow-up, in 1974. Full
of mid-tempo, rock-infused funk, the al-
bum opens with “Shoo-B-Doop and Cop
Him.” The song is many things: a deep
groove with Buddy Miles on lead guitar,
a strutting come-on, an ode to feminine
sexual power. None of her albums were
hits in their day, and Davis retired from
recording and performing altogether
in the 1980s. Her songs live on in the
music of Tamar-kali, Joi, Erykah Badu,
Kelis, Janelle Monáe, and more.
WRITER: Betty Mabry Publishing:
Higher Music Publishing Inc. (ASCAP)
/ Mabry Betty Music Co. (ASCAP),
Administered by Modern Works
Music Publishing PRODUCED BY Betty
Davis PERFORMED BY Betty Davis
Courtesy of Light in the Attic Records &
Distribution, LLC
13. HAVE YOU
BEEN GOOD
TO YOURSELF
Johnnie Frierson
In 2012, a local record collector dis-
covered a cassette tape of the self-
produced seven-track-long gospel
recording Have You Been Good to
Yourself in a Memphis thrift store.
Johnnie Frierson had been born in
the city in 1945 and sang and played
guitar for an area COGIC congrega-
tion with his younger sister, Mary. The
duo made rounds in the city’s vibrant
gospel and soul scenes, forming a
group, the Drapels, with two other
young musicians before landing at
Stax in 1963. Their recording “After
Laugher (Comes Tears),” co-written
by Johnnie, was released in 1964 as
a single by Wendy Rene—Mary had
been rechristened with a stage name
dreamt up by Otis Redding. While she
launched a solo career, Johnnie gigged
around town, sometimes cutting solo
recordings like “Tumbling Down” with
Willie Mitchell and Hi Records until
he was drafted to serve in Vietnam.
The artist returned home noticeably
shaken but continued to make music.
Frequent OA contributor and Brooks
Museum curator Andria Lisle calls the
intimate, soul-searching songs on Have
You Been Good To Yourself, recorded in
a home studio in the 1990s, “so laid-
back, yet so commanding.”
WRITER: Johnnie Lee Frierson
PUBLISHING: Light In The Attic Songs
(BMI), Administered by Domino
Publishing Company of America Inc.
PERFORMED BY Johnnie Frierson
Courtesy of Keesha Frierson & Light in
the Attic Records & Distribution, LLC
14. THE MIDNIGHT
SPECIAL
Big Bill Broonzy
Big Bill Broonzy’s life story is twisted
up in mystery. Everywhere some-
thing solid exists, one of his tall tales
seems to shake it loose. It’s believed
he was born in Arkansas, in 1903, as
Lee Conley Bradley, but, according to
Broonzy himself, he was born in 1893,
in Mississippi. As a natural and skilled
storyteller, Broonzy’s contributions to
the blues canon were marked by grip-
ping narratives that bent, shook, and
rattled with his guitar. Broonzy took
his unique style to Chicago with him
in 1920, and it caught on. His version
of “The Midnight Special,” released in
1938, revitalized the traditional folk
song, which is thought to have origi-
nated among imprisoned workers in
the South in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries.
TRADITIONAL PERFORMED BY Big Bill Broonzy
15. BY THE JASMINE
Tré Burt
Northern California–based singer-songwriter Tré Burt’s style combines classic
folk guitar with a newer lo-fi roots style. In 2019, Burt went from busking to getting
signed to the late John Prine’s Oh Boy Records. There, Burt re-recorded his first
album and set to work on a follow-up. “By the Jasmine” is his sophomore album’s
first single. Set in the streets of Sacramento, it was recorded in Durham, North
Carolina, reversing the typical flow of industry talent and establishing a blurred
boundary between old and new influences.
WRITER: Tré Burt PUBLISHING: TRE CL BURT MUSIC (BMI) PRODUCED BY Brad Cook
WRITTEN, ARRANGED, AND PERFORMED BY Tré Burt
16. BLUE RIDGE
MOUNTAINS
FLEET FOXES
With pacing like the ebbs and flows of a float traveling
down a river and the reverb turned to eleven, “Blue
Ridge Mountains” is from Fleet Foxes’ self-titled debut
album from 2008. Its sound is at once coming down
from high on the hill and also being shouted up. The
Seattle-based band culled multiple influences—Celtic
songs, church guitar choirs, Crosby, Stills, & Nash—
when creating the record. Yet it feels like something
we could play at home, with acoustic guitars, a piano,
and tight harmonies. “Blue Ridge Mountains” is also the
sound of finding a new home: “You’re ever welcome with
me anytime you like / Let’s drive to the countryside.”
WRITER: Robin Noel Pecknold PUBLISHING: Foxes Fellowship (ASCAP),
Administered by Kobalt Songs Music Publishing PRODUCED BY Phil Elk
PERFORMED BY Fleet Foxes
17. THE OCEAN
Particle Kid
Particle Kid was christened by his father Willie Nelson, who, emerging from a
haze of marijuana, misremembered the biblical story of the “prodigal son.” An
errant naming by the Outlaw King—like calling out to like. “The Ocean” is the
lead single from Particle Kid’s self-titled debut album, an insistent stream of
self-assurance and rejoining interrogation. The L.A.-based artist cites a span
of influences, from the panoramic folk of his forebears to the funk of Stax
Records’ house band.
WRITER: Jacob Micah Nelson PUBLISHING: Particle Kid LLC (BMI) PRODUCED BY Harlan
Steinberger WRITTEN, ARRANGED, AND PERFORMED BY Particle Kid
OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 165

18. DELTA LINE
Emily Scott Robinson
Colorado-based Emily Scott Robinson was born in Winston-Salem and grew up in
Greensboro, North Carolina. “Delta Line” from the album Traveling Mercies displays
the artist’s tendency toward strong characters and vivid storytelling, inflecting a
vast record of familial drama with meticulous details of personal ruin. Robinson
employs the archetype of the train to convey country’s classic themes of searching
and yearning, with Rolling Stone naming the totality of Traveling Mercies one of
the top country and Americana albums of 2019.
WRITER: Emily Scott Robinson PUBLISHING: EMILY ROBINSON (ASCAP) PRODUCED BY
Neilson Hubbard PERFORMED BY Emily Scott Robinson
19. LIKE NINA
Sunny War
Sunny War’s “Like Nina” is a soft, mournful dive into the roles of Black women in
American music: they can either “dance like Tina,” “sing love songs like Aretha,”
or have a “Beyhive.” War is like Nina Simone with her “sad look” and “demeanor,”
and she sings this proclamation gently but firmly over skillful chords plucked on
her electric guitar. Based in Los Angeles, Sunny War is a folk-punk musician from
Nashville, Tennessee. “Like Nina” is from Simple Syrup (2021).
WRITER: Sydney Ward PUBLISHING: Sunny War (BMI) PRODUCED BY Harlan
Steinberger WRITTEN, ARRANGED, AND PERFORMED BY Sunny War
20. AIN’T NO WAY
ARETHA FRANKLIN
“Ain’t No Way” is the lush, open-hearted finale of Lady
Soul, Aretha Franklin’s twelfth album and third for
Atlantic in just two years. Its center is Franklin’s vocal,
which is sinuous and lithe, restrained yet teeming
with silken sincerity. At twenty-five, the artist was at
one apex of many throughout her six-decade career.
She accompanies herself on piano; she takes her time.
Franklin’s first utterance of the word love, thirty
seconds in, lasts nearly an entire measure and stretches
out for a melismatic six syllables. Her baby sister
Carolyn composed the lyric and its melody. Frequently
covered by “the best storytellers in Black music’s
matrilineal generations,” as Tarisai Ngangura writes in
this magazine, the song describes an unrealized love; in
this sense, it is a mourning song, a lament. It is also one
of refusal. There is an urgent plea, and its resolution: the
narrator will not belabor the attempt. “Ain’t No Way” is
a lesson in moving on, reclaiming one’s time, saying no
to what hurts, what will not let up.
WRITER: Carolyn Franklin Publishing: Cotillion Music Inc. (BMI) /
Fourteenth Hour Music Inc. (BMI), ADMINISTERED BY Warner Chappel Music,
Inc. PRODUCED BY Jerry Wexler PERFORMED BY Aretha Franklin
166 WINTER 2021
Statement of Ownership, Management, and Circulation.
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 Windgate Center
for Fine and
Performing Arts,
Opening Fall ‘22

E
xpression thrives at UCA.
Thanks to a $20 million matching gift from the
Windgate Foundation, we are transforming that passion for visual
arts, film, theater, music and more into an artistic anchor for the entire
region. With this new destination, everyone – students, community
members, faculty, alumni – will appreciate the arts in a whole new way.
Experience it with us next year.

▶ Nearly 100,000 square feet of studio, ▶ Indoor & outdoor art spaces
classroom, rehearsal & design spaces ▶ Scene/wood shop
▶ 175-seat black box theater equipped ▶ 450-seat concert hall
with state-of-the-art technology ▶ Percussion suite

Go here. Go anywhere. UCA.edu

 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

13 14 15

VOCAL 16 17 18

VISIONARIES 19

23 24
20

25
21 22

BY SIMON MAROTTE
26 27 28 29

30 31 32 33 34

35 36 37 38
ACROSS
1. High points 39 40 41
6. Sting’s instrument
10 . Little prankster 42 43 44 45
13 . Furious
14 . “What ___ is new?” 46 47 48 49
15 . Reminder of surgery
16 . “Feeling Good” singer born 50 51 52 53 54
in Tryon, North Carolina
18 . Low-carb diet 55 56 57 58

19 . Hamilton’s bill
20. Salacious stuff 59 60 61

21 . Three sheets to the wind

62 63 64
23. White water
25 . Celery unit
26. “Feel Like Makin’ Love” singer born
in Black Mountain, North Carolina
30. College dinner staple
33. Cousins of paddles
34. Oolong, e.g. D OW N
35 . On vacation 1 . “___ Got No / I Got Life” 31. Army no-show
36. Handmade weapons? (hit by 16-Across) 32. Fiercely protective types,
38. Let off steam 2. Colonial newscaster colloquially
39. ___ de plume 3. Food from above 36. Lizzo’s leggings
40. Vitriol 4. GPS approximation 37. Varieties
41 . Have a ball 5. Time in studio 38. Large containers
42. “I Feel a Song (In My Heart)” singer 6. Puzzle 40. Memory unit
born in Atlanta, Georgia 7. Oodles 41. Online scam artist
46. Shower alternatives 8. Tax form ID 43. Father, familiarly
47 . The Marvelous Mrs. ___ 9. React to a forceful blow 44. “Don’t worry about me”
50 . Abba’s home country 1 0. Athlete on a rink 45. Lady ___ (pop star)
52. Fireplace fuel 1 1 . Aussie’s buddy 48. Wipe clean, as a blackboard
53. Fishing stick 12 . Urge on 49. Rich ore deposits
55. Starring role 15 . Handful for Hamlet 50. Messy person
56. “On & On” singer in the churchyard 51. Shed tears
born in Dallas, Texas 1 7 . Website for cinephiles 52. Wildcat
59. WSM radio show 22. Buffoons 54. “My man!”
60. Fish in some salads 24. Zebras, to lions 5 7. Regret
61 . Lessened, as pain 25. “Pronto!” 58. Sweetheart, slangily
62 . Best-selling K-pop group 27 . Classical scholar and pianist Charles
63 . “___ and I Know It” 28. 50 ___ (“Candy Shop” rapper)
(2012 No. 1 hit by LMFAO) 29. Perry with the 2010 hit “Firework” PUZZLE SOLUTION
64. Actress Witherspoon 30. Tolled, as bells FOUND ON PAGE 160.

168 WINTER 2021

 Resilience
North Carolina Art Now
January 13 – July 10, 2022

Durham, NC I nasher.duke.edu/randr
Clarence Heyward, PTSD (detail), 2020. Acrylic and gold leaf on
canvas, 60 x 48 inches (152.4 x 121.92 cm). Courtesy of the artist.
© Clarence Heyward. Image courtesy of the artist. Reckoning and
Resilience: North Carolina Art Now is generously supported by

Additional support provided by The Nancy A. Nasher

and David J. Haemisegger Family Fund for Exhibitions.
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