A Nightstick Turned Into a Song

Josh Kun 
March 15, 2012
http://prospect.org/article/nightstick-turned-song

     Two new books and a documentary cue up the
     soundtrack of the black-power movement.

In January, President Barack Obama made his singing
debut on the stage of Harlem's Apollo Theater. During a
campaign fundraising speech, he leaned into the
microphone, gently slid his State of the Union baritone
up to a whispery falsetto, and nailed the opening line
from "Let's Stay Together," the Al Green soul classic
that has melted hearts and warmed sheets since its
release in 1971. "I-I-I-I, I'm so in love with you,"
Obama cooed. The video of his impromptu performance has
logged more than four million views, and the song has
become an unofficial re-election theme. Obama's
rendition is available as a ringtone; inevitably, Green
showed up to sing it at an event in February.

Yet the power of the clipped cover version was its
resurrection of the ghosts of Obamas past. The serenade
was a reminder not just of the subtle swagger that found
Obama brushing the dirt off his shoulders à la Jay-Z
back in 2008 but also of a tradition of civil rights-era
black culture and politics that Obama seemed to have
shed since gaining the presidency. Here were echoes of
the Obama who'd been no stranger to love songs or
political hope, the Obama who, as he wrote in his 1995
memoir, Dreams from My Father, stayed up late listening
to Billie Holiday and schooling himself in the
corrosions of American racism by reading James Baldwin,
W.E.B. Du Bois, Ralph Ellison, and The Autobiography of
Malcolm X. For anyone who winced just a little when
Obama invited Beyoncé to sing "At Last" at his
inauguration dance instead of Etta James, the road-worn
R&B veteran who made it famous, Obama's bedroom-soul-man
turn was a musical olive branch and a return to form.

"Let's Stay Together" has never been just a love song.
When Green, the son of a sharecropper in the segregated
South, recorded it in Memphis, the city where Martin
Luther King Jr. had been assassinated three years
earlier, its message quickly became a gospel proposition
to keep on loving, even in the face of breakups that by
then were economic and cultural and stretched from Watts
to Vietnam. Like so much black music of the 1960s and
1970s, Green's songs became political because of the
experience that gave birth to them and the experience
they spoke to at the bloody crest of the civil-rights
movement.

As Gil Scott-Heron, the author of Black Power-era
standards like "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised"
and "Whitey on the Moon," puts it in his recently
published posthumous memoir, The Last Holiday:

If you were alive on the planet earth and Black,
particularly a Black American, in the most awkward and
uncomfortable position imaginable, that of a certified,
tax-paying citizen, with roots in the land around you
that went back three hundred years, you still got the
short end of every stick except the nightstick, and
there was damn near no way you could not have political
pressure on you and therefore have political opinions.

In the face of that default politicization, Etta James,
Aretha Franklin, Marvin Gaye, and the Temptations waged
what Scott-Heron dubs "a melodic form of guerrilla
warfare," turning the long end of the nightstick into a
song. By the start of the 1960s, saxophonist Sonny
Rollins had already hitched jazz to black liberation,
and We Insist! Max Roach's Freedom Now Suite had
captured the sound of injustice in Abbey Lincoln's
piercing scream. In 1964, after the murder of civil-
rights activist Medgar Evers and the Birmingham church
bombing that left four African American girls in its
rubble, Nina Simone delivered the ferocious musical
accusation "Mississippi Goddamn"-"a show tune," she
quipped, "but the show hasn't been written for it yet."
James Brown, of course, energized marches with calls of
"Soul Power" and recorded "Say It Loud (I'm Black and
I'm Proud)," a personal manifesto that became a
generational anthem.



Music was also an indispensable part of the Black Power
message, from the movement's founding call, at a 1966
Mississippi protest, by Student Nonviolent Coordinating
Committee (SNCC) chair Stokely Carmichael ("We been
saying `Freedom' for six years. . What we are going to
start saying now is `Black Power!'") to its decline by
the late 1970s. In the recent documentary The Black
Power Mixtape, a collection of rare movement interviews
and footage shot by Swedish journalists and spliced with
modern commentary, UCLA historian Robin Kelley suggests
that the boycotts, free breakfast drives, and self--
published newspapers were all an expression of what
Kelley calls "the Black radical tradition, a tradition
of struggle, of organization." Despite the promise of
the film's title, though, The Black Power Mixtape ends
up only implying that music was central. Ahmir Questlove
Thompson of the current hip-hop band The Roots provides
the score, and singer Erykah Badu and rappers Talib
Kweli and John Forté weigh in on the old clips. But save
for an uncredited blues performance under the closing
titles and a brief, stunning scene of a children's choir
at the Black Panther headquarters, turning the shimmying
1960s rock hit "Land of 1,000 Dances" into anti-cop pop
(put "Guns, pick up the guns, pick up the guns and put
the pigs on the run" in all the places where "Na, na,
na" used to be), The Black Power Mixtape is missing a
mixtape.



That is where Pat Thomas's new book Listen, Whitey!: The
Sounds of Black Power, 1965-1975 comes in. A detailed
chronicle of an era when revolutionaries preached on
records and pop rebels preached in song, Listen, Whitey!
is anchored by revelatory archival research as well as
interviews with former Black Panther leaders David
Hilliard, Elaine Brown, and Bobby Seale. It shines,
though, as a showcase for Thomas's audiovisual treasure
chest: 250 full-color reproductions of LPs, 45s, and
cassettes containing everything from jazz and soul to
speeches, comedy routines, sermons, and accounts of
black soldiers in Vietnam. Thomas is a veteran producer
of reissue CDs, not a scholar, and his book, which takes
its title from a 1972 Folkways album of interviews with
everyday African Americans about King's assassination,
sometimes reads like impassioned fan history. Yet
whether he's unearthing the Black Panther house band The
Lumpen, forgotten progressive record labels like
Folkways' Paredon and Motown's Black Forum, or Amiri
Baraka fronting his own raucous Afro-centric funk band
on It's Nation Time, Thomas shows how hard it is to
separate the era's black recordings from its freedom
movements.

He reminds us that The Supremes' "Someday We'll Be
Together" was played during the funeral of slain Black
Panther Fred Hampton. The Temptations' Eddie Kendricks,
on the cover of his 1972 solo album People . Hold On,
paid tribute to Black Panther co-founder Huey P. Newton
by sitting in a cane chair while gripping a large spear.
On RAP, a 1970 album issued by the SNCC, a speech by its
leader H. Rap Brown shared space with a live set from
psychedelic jazz yodeler Leon Thomas at the Fillmore
East. Before Elaine Brown became the Black Panthers'
deputy minister of information, she released two
respectable albums of poetic, agitprop soul ballads with
arrangement help from Watts jazz activist Horace
Tapscott.

One of Brown's songs, the rousing "Until We're Free"
(recalling "desperate kisses in alleyways" that "laid to
waste our little lives"), is included on the book's
invaluable companion CD. Other finds include a stark
piano solo version of Scott--Heron's political weather
report, "Winter in America," and both sides of a rare,
finger--snapping slice of Nation of Islam jazz poetry,
"Invitation to Black Power," from the Shahid Quintet.

Early on in Listen, Whitey!, Thomas says that he sees
his project as a rebuttal of caricatures of black
revolutionaries as gun-strapped, "white devil"-baiting
nationalists. The surprising diversity of the recordings
he covers (including a welcome section on black women
poets) certainly challenges some myths. Black Power's
political pitfalls, though, get shorter shrift here. For
all of its push for what Nina Simone called "returning
the black man's pride," the movement's romanticizing of
militant rhetoric and Maoism and even occasional
spilling over into criminality have dampened its revival
appeal. The era's music, however, has aged more
gracefully, and the songs and speeches Thomas surveys
speak to tensions that continue in the present: prison
reform, economic injustice, Wall Street greed. The era's
sepia-toned institutionalized racism also lingers, of
course, sometimes in all too vibrant color. A black
president may sing Al Green at the Apollo, but
conservative leaders like Newt Gingrich don't think
twice about linking him to food stamps and "Kenyan,
anti-colonial behavior."

As Listen, Whitey! suggests, the end goal for many was a
larger reimagining of American society that involved
thinking across racial lines. Which is where Thomas
begins, with Huey P. Newton listening to Bob Dylan's
"Ballad of a Thin Man" and deciding it must be an
American racial parable, starring the white Mr. Jones as
a black ghetto voyeur. Agree with it or not, Newton's
remix was in its own way a love song for an America that
didn't exist yet, an acidic vision of a society
struggling to stay together. As the singer of that new
ringtone suggests, it's a struggle that has still not
left us.

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