Every song tells a story. The songs in this book tell the story of a revolution—of multiple revolutions taking place at once. Within the black music tradition, one finds that all things flow along multiple rhythms. The rhythms of change were everywhere in the United States at the end of the 1960s: in global war and conflict, in the arena of social justice, at the personal level of identity, and in popular culture. Everything, it appeared for a moment, was undergoing a radical transformation.
The revolution discussed here is what was called the black revolution. The black revolution involved radical, confrontational ideas of dramatic change, yet the topic was well established in the mainstream of American discourse at the time, and nearly every American had an opinion about it. The black revolution encompassed dreams of overturning the social order, of confronting white racists and destroying the racial caste system in America, of destroying the capitalist dominion over Western economies, of purging the culture and history of Eurocentric distortions and replacing them with ones that would be vibrant and empowering to all, and of transforming black life from one of perpetual crisis into one of black- and African-inspired celebration.
On a structural, economic level, the revolution did not materialize. On a cultural level, the repercussions were long lasting and indelible. On the level of identity formation, on the essential transformation from the flaccid term Negro to the prideful black, the revolution was triumphant. Yet even the term black, as a revolutionary symbol, would eventually lose much of its significance. Perhaps the most lasting example of the radical changes that took place during this period was the revolution in black music. From the transformations of soul music by Curtis Mayfield, Sly Stone, Aretha Franklin, and James Brown to the bold sonic assaults on the status quo by the likes of Nina Simone and Jimi Hendrix, the evidence was clear that a radical moment was upon us.
The radical moment was fueled by the idea of “black power!” Black power was more than a political movement driven by nationalism and enmity toward whites, it was a resistance culture, a means of reclaiming one’s identity through the events and actions of one’s daily life during this time of radical change. The music and other cultural productions of the times played a significant role in this process. People heard the speeches and went to the rallies, but they also danced to the music and felt the fire of revolution flow through their bodies in motion. The cultural politics of black power were crucial to the times.
Stokely Carmichael (later Kwame Ture) was one of the most prolific black radicals of the 1960s. In his early years leading the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and later as a key proponent of black power, Carmichael was one of the most prominent and effective organizers in the civil rights/black power era. He was a frequent ally and foil to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and was an undisputed leader of the movement. While he was seen as a political activist, he was influenced by the music, by the culture of the people, just like everyone else. In his memoir, Ready for Revolution, he discusses the impact of black popular music on his movement: “I really dug into the popular music aspect—soul, rhythm and blues, even funk a little—of this uprising of political and cultural consciousness, and not just because it reached millions of our people. We are an African people, so it was natural that from the beginning, from the spirituals right on up, music would be our weapon and our solace.”
Carmichael recognized black music as the weapon that it is and expressed an understanding of its evolution as a parallel to the many social movements with which he was well acquainted. For those of his generation, knowledge and pride in the history of black music went hand in hand with knowledge and pride in the history of the black struggle. Carmichael further explains:
Indeed, certain jazz musicians had always incorporated a high social and cultural consciousness into their work. And in the early sixties, artists like Sister Odetta, Oscar Brown Jr., Max Roach and Abbey Lincoln with their We Insist! Max Roach’s Freedom Now Suite, or Nina Simone’s “Mississippi Goddam” and “Young, Gifted and Black” had reflected the Southern struggle.
But now something slightly different. Political consciousness moved into the popular arena. Soul, rhythm and blues, stuff that had been purely commercial, dance music, entertainment. I think Bro Sam Cooke (peace be unto him) might have got in first with “A Change Is Gonna Come.” After that we talking about people like Marvin Gaye, “What’s Going On,” Brother Curtis Mayfield, “We’re a Winner,” “Keep On Pushing,” “People Get Ready,” Sister Aretha Franklin’s “Respect,” and of course, the King of Soul, Brother James Brown’s “Say It Loud (I’m Black and I’m Proud.)” This music reached people we couldn’t otherwise reach. How effectively I can’t say. But from it, one sensed an exuberant mood in the community.1
Carmichael was aware of the relationship between the revolution in the social structure he was fighting for every day as an activist and the revolutionary changes taking place in the daily lives of the people he had chosen to serve. Carmichael reveals himself as a soul brother, someone likely as adept on the dance floor as on the rally stage. Indeed it was Car-michael’s soulfulness—his personal style and ability to flow and improvise within his community—that made him a great movement leader.
Carmichael also makes the valid point that soul music reached many more people than he did, emphasizing that in many cases the sounds may have been different, but the impulse was the same. As comedian Dick Gregory said at the time, “You’d hear Aretha three or four times an hour. You’d only hear [Dr. Martin Luther] King on the news.”2 The dissemination of the ideals, the ideologies of the movement, were in an important way accomplished through the popular culture of the day: in the language used by radio DJs, in the fashions deployed by entertainers, the slang used by activists that sought to affirm their street credentials as well as validate their analyses of the movement, and in a dozen other ways.
“Black power,” like soul, was an elusive slogan to define at the time, yet you knew it when you felt it. The live black music show was one site at which people from all walks of life were given a communal space—a radical concept at the time—to behave with abandon. While this might be dismissed as simply a recreational respite from the true grind of the movement, many of the movement’s goals and ideals were formed, focused, and quite literally brought to life there. In the early 1960s, audiences of youth were living integration on the dance floor, witnessing equality—and quite clearly experiencing freedom—with each beat and freeform physical gyration to the music. Their pleasure was in itself a form of political expression, and the politics of pleasure were on full display, shouting down the politics of partisanship.
As the great soul singers began to dominate black popular music—James Brown, Aretha Franklin, Otis Redding, the Temptations, and others—their concerts became spaces of celebration of far more than dance moves. As James Brown put it, “The word soul meant a lot of things, in music and out. It was about the roots of black music, and it was kind of a pride thing too, being proud of yourself and your people. Soul music and the civil rights movement went hand in hand, sort of grew up together.”3
By the end of the 1960s a new, more militant strand of black music emerged. From within the black radical movement, the poets, jazz combos, and a few courageous rhythm and blues performers pushed a message of total revolution on their audiences and received a response of exhilaration and righteous indignation that resonated with the power of Malcolm X’s speeches. For the militant performer, the production involved a performance of blackness, of hypermasculinity and hyperbole, of smack talk that put the Man in his place and exalted everything gloriously black and proud among the people. The collective soul experience was no longer the ideal; this was about becoming—or re-becoming—black, and if it made whites uncomfortable, well then it was about time they too felt isolation in their own land.
During this heated time in American history, entertainers were often political and political leaders were unmistakably entertaining. Often the tenor of the times blurred the roles of each. The multifaceted pianist and singer Nina Simone was an enigmatic advocate for social causes. As an entertainer, the classically trained prodigy had established herself as a musical tour de force as she played concert halls from her native North Carolina to Paris in the early 1960s. However, as events in the civil rights movement compelled a reorganization of her views, she developed a protest music repertoire and produced piercing commentary on the changes evolving at the time. In her concerts she openly defied and challenged her predominantly white audiences, often claiming from the stage, “This next song is only for the black people that are here.” In her memoir I Put a Spell On You, Simone positioned herself within the movement:
I realized that what we were really fighting for was the creation of a new society. When I had started out in the movement all I wanted were my rights under the constitution. But the more I thought about it the more I realized that despite what the President or the supreme court might say, the only way we could get true equality was if America changed completely from top to bottom. And this change had to start with my own people, with black revolution.4
Simone, as a touring artist, was one of the most prolific artists to emerge as an activist from the stage, with songs like “Mississippi Goddam,” a blistering (yet comical) rant against Southern Jim Crow racism in 1963 and “Why? (The King of Love Is Dead),” a ballad for Martin Luther King Jr. cowritten with Weldon Irvine just days after Dr. King’s death. Nina Simone, as an entertainer, longed to be a part of the movement as a fulltime participant:
When I went on marches or played benefits I watched all the full-time activists embracing and laughing, grooving together, and I knew that when it was over they’d go home to eat, argue politics, listen to music, make love and sleep. The next day they’d make plans to meet up again on the next march and then go back into their communities to live out the ideas they believed in. They belonged; I didn’t.5
In her revealing lament, Nina Simone understood just how exciting, how fulfilling, and how soulful movement life was for the many activists she knew. She understood that the movement was not merely a series of political actions and position papers. It involved thousands of young people (and others) in the prime of life taking action on behalf of their people for the purpose of justice—not for profit or for popularity. The politics of pleasure were working in tandem with the politics of revolutionary change.
In his memoir of life as a Black Panther, We Want Freedom, Mumia Abu-Jamal recounts the narrative of Naima Major, a young high school student and National Negro Scholar, who was transformed by the movement and by the Black Panther Party. Major recalled the feeling and the energy of her political transformation, and the organic way her experiences cohered with her social growth:
I went to a Free Huey Rally at the federal building in SF, and met many brave Panthers. Went on a mission with Kathleen Cleaver in Hunter’s Point because my beloved was one of her self-appointed guards. Captured body and soul by the rally and the love and energy of black people. My favorite retort to almost anything soon became “And how does that free the people?” I was dogmatic and insufferable, but could dance you down at a house party!6
Major’s movement catechism was part and parcel of the lived experience of soul at the time, as young people were being educated, energized, and transformed by a movement that evolved on their terms.
Many of the most memorable changes in black music—Marvin Gaye’s transformation from pop crooner to movement preacher on “What’s Going On,” Jimi Hendrix’s evolution from blues rocker in the Jimi Hendrix Experience to thunder-funk pioneer in the Band of Gypsys, from James Brown’s ruggedly intimate ballads to his outburst of righteous, primal funk—occurred as the civil rights movement exploded into the black power movement in a cataclysm of rage and rebellion.
At the dawn of the 1960s, black popular music was established in three fairly self-contained, self-defined, and self-segregating formats: rhythm and blues, jazz, and gospel. Rhythm and blues was the most popular form of dance entertainment, led at the time by Ray Charles and the early pop icons from Motown such as Smokey Robinson. The earliest of the 1960s soul crooners, Sam Cooke and Jackie Wilson, were just beginning to make their mark, and Aretha Franklin was toiling away at Columbia recording comparatively tame pop and jazz standards. Some of the strongest yet most mysterious sounds of discontent were coming from the avant-garde jazz community, with artists such as Charles Mingus Jr., Max Roach, and Archie Shepp and free-thinking experimenters such as Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, and John Coltrane musing upon ideas of what radical change is all about.
When the 1960s began, rock and roll as a pop phenomenon was defined by Elvis Presley gyrating his hips on national television in an imitation of the Memphis soul brothers he had learned from. When the sixties ended, rock was defined by Jimi Hendrix abusing the “Star-Spangled Banner” at the Woodstock concert in August 1969. When the sixties began, jazz was defined by John Coltrane’s soaring spirituality and Quincy Jones’s pop sophistication. When the decade ended, jazz was defined by Miles Davis’s electronic swamp dirge at the Bitches Brew sessions. Black dance music began the sixties with the joyous, rowdy rocking of Ray Charles and ended with James Brown and Aretha Franklin righteously ripping into the souls of their audiences.
The one constant through the musical machinations was the role of gospel music. Eventually gospel music would be changed by the movement as well, but it is important to note that as an autonomous institution of black self-definition and success, the recorded spirituals, first developed as a recorded idiom in 1932 by Rev. Thomas Dorsey, had become a standard bearer for the survival of blacks in the Jim Crow South and throughout the country.
During the early years of the civil rights movement, the black church was the central organizing structure and spiritual home base for a generation seeking to work up the courage to challenge white racist violence. One fundamental element of the black church experience was and is the music, the timeless sounds of salvation that have passed from generations of slaves to the present day. These sorrow songs would eventually morph into freedom songs, and the church became the source of inspiration for the movement. Martin Luther King Jr. utilized the power of spirituals to keep him going through the desperate times, and specifically requested that Mahalia Jackson perform before his “I Have a Dream” speech at the March on Washington in 1963. Jackson was on the stage during Dr. King’s famous speech and urged King to leave his scripted text, shouting, “Tell them about your dream, Martin! Tell them about the dream!” Mahalia Jackson’s presence may have been the spark that made a legend out of the man on that unforgettable day.7
As a representation of the bittersweet past and as a symbol of the promise of the future, the music of the black church was and remains a core element in the coherence of the black experience. Waldo E. Martin Jr. explains the nature of gospel music as a social movement force:
It might appear that gospel is the least political and worldly of African American musics. In fact the opposite is true. Gospel music—like the spirituals—is highly political in a broad sense of the term, if for no other reason than that it functions as a means to constitute a unified community to forge a collective consciousness. It likewise functions as a locus of unrestrained celebration as well as a soothing balm. It offers hope and possibility.8
To offer hope and possibility in the face of the unspeakable terrors facing civil rights activists in the South bears witness to the unique powers of the gospel music experience. The physical reality of the dangers, the uncertainty, and the fear involved in the struggle would sway in the moment of the music, in the netherworld of sensation, as a collective emotional state takes over as one gives themselves away to the song. Through the innate healing power of the music—of the sounds, of the rhythms, of the collectively shared physical motion, the exhilaration of the unified harmonies—a sense of unbounded power emerges, and the terrestrial fears and trials are suspended for the moment. Gospel music forges a sustainable moment of courage out of one of despair and retreat.
The civil rights movement was a time when improvisation was the standard for both movement activities and the music the activists produced. Many traditional gospel songs were reformulated for the needs of the moment. The urgent and triumphant traditional song “Keep Your Hand on the Plow” was reimagined by civil rights activist Alice Wine and transformed into “Keep Your Eyes on the Prize,” while the simplest of gospel standards, the melodic “Amen”—sung with the word extended “aaa-men!”—was transformed by young activists at the early sit-ins to become “free-dom!” The use of the song, and so many others, was piggybacking on the moral-spiritual backing of the church, and was brought into a new secular realm of social justice.
Gospel songs, and the sounds of gospel music, would continue to be used as fodder for civil rights workers through the decade. But as black power began to emerge as a theme, a new sound of resistance emerged, and the range of songs used by the movement expanded to popular rhythm and blues tunes. Chants and riffs from the radio became a part of the movement lexicon. Titles like “Tell It Like It Is,” “Get Ready,” and “Take Me as I Am” were imbibed with meanings beyond their intended lyrics. One marcher in 1966 on the long March Against Fear in Mississippi (also known as the Black Power March) came up with a revision to the lyrics of Wilson Pickett’s hit song “Land of 1000 Dances,” which was known at the time to bounce along with an effervescent beat with lyrics such as: “Put your hand on your hips, yeah / Let your backbone slip / Do the Watusi / Like my little Lucy.” The improvised black power lyrics and crowd response went as follows:
I said freedom got a shotgun / oh yeah!
I said freedom got a shotgun / oh yeah!
You know freedom gonna shoot it / oh yeah!
At those segregated bigots! / oh yeah!
I said freedom got a shotgun! / oh yeah!
Naaa na-na-na naaa
The singer and the crowd then joined in with the familiar vocal hook of the song “naa na-na-na naaa,” wrapping the audience of marchers in a collective interpretation of popular song, reinterpreted for the movement.9 Soul music—black popular music—would become the template for new movement songs. Conversely, the movement in the streets would inspire a rhythm-driven awakening of music in jazz, in funk, and in soul that captured a people’s aspirations just as the people were awakening.
The rhetoric of revolution was a common thread throughout the discourse of the civil rights / black power movements. The revolution carried a set of meanings among black Americans that evolved dramatically during those years. From the outset of the civil rights movement in the mid-1950s, the struggle for black equality developed with a spirit more hopeful than at any time since the American Civil War a century prior. When NAACP lawyer Thurgood Marshall successfully argued to the Supreme Court in the famous 1954 Brown v. Board of Education case that segregation was unconstitutional, a number of new social constructs were unleashed. The idea that Negroes possessed some form of self-determination, and that their own actions could bring about changes in the racial caste system, was a revelation. For so long, generations of impoverished and terrorized Negroes had been at the mercy of their white neighbors. By the time of the Rosa Parks incident in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955, which challenged and eventually brought an end to segregated busing in the South, the idea began to take hold that Negroes themselves could be the initiators of social change.
In addition, the prospect that equality could be imagined with an increasing sense of realism meant that black culture, black life, black values, black morality, and black thought were worthy on their own terms. Even within the context of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s vision of nonviolent civil disobedience, for a young and hopeful generation a “revolution within” was taking place.
As organizational activity spread and the agitation for equal rights increased, a proportional increase in cultural pride emerged, as black people found within their culture—their writing, their drama and visual arts, their scholarship, their folkways, and especially their music—the evidence that equality was their birthright. The example of self-reliance displayed by the Nation of Islam and its fiery spokesman, Malcolm X, affirmed that Negroes had not only the same inalienable rights as whites, but also possessed their own moral, spiritual, and physical resources to create a new society on their own terms.
One universally acknowledged cornerstone of the movement was the work of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. His charismatic leadership and advocacy of nonviolent civil disobedience in the face of raw southern violence earned him the indisputable mantle as leader of the movement. And it was Dr. King’s iconic August 1963 speech at the March on Washington that served as a celebration and a summary of the movement to that point. It is important to note that during the early portion of Dr. King’s speech, he did not temper the tone of the social revolution that was taking place on the streets of America:
It would be fatal for the nation to overlook the urgency of the moment. This sweltering summer of the Negro’s legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality….
There will be neither rest nor tranquility in America until the Negro is granted his citizenship rights. The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice emerges.10
This was not the idealistic imagery that Dr. King is so well known for. On this most revered of occasions, Dr. King threatened the nation with death, claiming it would be fatal to overlook the crisis at hand. The revolution had clearly arrived at Dr. King’s doorstep. Dr. King was keenly aware of the simmering rage that was dwelling within his people, and he sought to harness it in a useful way. The “whirlwinds of revolt” would continue to spiral out of control as the decade progressed, despite Dr. King’s best efforts.
A confluence of events in 1965 sparked a new branch of the movement, one in which the aspects of nonviolent civil disobedience began to lose their relevance. The assassination of Malcolm X on February 21 initiated a widespread reappraisal of his writings and speeches by a new generation of young rebels. Fractures within the movement began to emerge, which brought contradictory value systems among blacks into view. The passage of the Voting Rights Act in August 1965, only weeks after the brutal beatings of civil rights marchers in Selma, Alabama, was considered a fallacy by many dispossessed people (though liberal lawmakers considered it a hard-fought victory against staunchly racist opposition). The frustration reached a breaking point when South Central Los Angeles exploded in the Watts uprising on August 11, 1965.
The growth of ideas contrary to integration—which included the rise of black nationalism, the emergence of independent African nations and the spread of Marxist revolutionary thought, the reappraisal and affection for Africa, and the daily outrages of black life in the cities—all became fuel for an ideological explosion of antiassimilationist ideas in black America. Stokely Carmichael’s chant of “black power,” introduced midway through the Mississippi March Against Fear in the summer of 1966, became the new rallying cry of the dispossessed and coalesced a growing, yet still unfocused, feeling among a new generation of black youth.
As the leaders of the civil rights movement met resistance and deeper-entrenched problems in the northern cities in the latter half of the 1960s, a less hopeful mood set in. A new perspective emerged among many in the black community disillusioned with the system, yet still determined to agitate for change. In many urban areas a sense of inevitable confrontation with the power structure began to emerge. The black revolution began to take on increasingly literal physical interpretations.
The construct of revolution was galvanized by the words of Malcolm X. The Nation of Islam’s minister of mosque number seven in Harlem was well known on the New York streets as the champion orator of black causes in the early 1960s. Malcolm X consistently derided the established civil rights leaders at the time, whom he claimed were only seeking superficial change and access to a society that Malcolm and others saw as corrupt. Malcolm X did not validate the idea that a revolution was taking place merely because people were marching for voting rights or for access to public facilities or businesses. He did not entertain the idea of access to white institutions as a goal. He used the model of the anticolonial struggles for freedom in Africa, Asia, and Latin America as his frame of reference. These struggles frequently involved violent battles over land utilizing guerilla warfare. As a veteran of the violence of urban black survival, Malcolm was able to bring this comparison down to the street level for his audiences. He made this point clear in Detroit in 1963 in his “Message to the Grass Roots”:
You don’t know what a revolution is. If you did, you wouldn’t use that word. A revolution is bloody. Revolution is hostile. Revolution knows no compromise. Revolution overturns and destroys everything that gets in its way. Who ever heard of a revolution where they lock arms … singing “we shall overcome”? You don’t do that in a revolution. You don’t do any singing, you’re too busy swinging.11
Within a few years, many of Malcolm’s predictions would come to pass. At the end of the 1960s the spirit of the revolution was everywhere: in the marches, in the chants, in the rebellions, and in the arts.
This defiant energy gave rise to many black radical ideas, pronouncements, and organizations. Young people wanted to get in on the revolution by any means necessary. They began study groups and newsletters, organized picket lines and rallies, confronted people in power, and in the process shed their fears of the police, of the justice system, and of the omnipresent aura of white privilege. They wrote about their actions in journals and in fiction; they designed, painted, and sketched posters and banners and flyers with vibrant black revolutionary symbols; they danced and sang songs with African rhythms; they wrote plays that imagined a racial apocalypse; and they screamed poems and played music with the pulse of their newfound black fire. The black power movement and the Black Arts movement emerged and thrived simultaneously.
The important point emerging from this is that the Movement was a double revolution, a revolution in the streets and a revolution in symbols, images and ideas—a revolution, in a word, of the word. The two revolutions unfolded at the same time and were complimentary facets of the same reality: the historical explosion of a people in the sudden labor of self-discovery, self-determination, and self-legitimization.12
The revolution would become a popular catchphrase, a catchall term for use by anyone ready and willing to rally around people’s outrage at the power structure. Rock star and former Beatle John Lennon publicly proclaimed the need for a revolution as he agitated for his anti-Vietnam War protests in 1971. When the Last Poets released “Niggers Are Scared of Revolution” in June 1970 and Gil Scott-Heron re-recorded his sarcastic “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” in April 1971, the songs captured just how omnipresent and yet versatile the idea of revolution was at that moment. Eventually the term would be manipulated and maligned, and its literal and symbolic meaning would be lost. For a time, however, there was quite clearly revolution in the air.
The Black Panther Party took the idea of revolution seriously. The organization crafted itself as an outgrowth of the vision of Malcolm X and proclaimed itself the vanguard of the revolution. Early on, with their menacing image—wearing black leather, black berets, and carrying weapons—the Panthers stood uncompromisingly on the national scene as defiant black militants willing to take on the US power structure. New recruits joined the Party with the notion that they were going to be in a life-or-death encounter with law enforcement at some point in the near future and committed themselves to that inevitability.
As rank-and-file members of the Black Panther Party, the young men who became members of the Lumpen had also made this commitment. None of them joined the Party to play songs. They joined to give their lives to the struggle, to the revolution. Eventually, as a result of a number of dramatic events, the Black Panther Party broadened its scope, and the Lumpen group was created to popularize that black revolution.
The impact of the black power movement in general and the Black Panther Party in particular on the landscape of American culture and identity formation was nothing short of transformative. It is important to note that the role of identity politics in modern American life emerged from the black power era movements. As Michael Omi and Howard Winant write in Racial Formation in the United States: “The black movement redefined the meaning of racial identity, and consequently of race itself, in American society.”13 The popularity of the phrase “black is beautiful” was perhaps the simplest and most elegant example of what transpired during those years. Blacks generated a new cultural value system on their own terms and marked their own reference points of value in a contemporary American context.
These new matrices of meaning were also fundamental to the struggles of other racialized groups in America. As Jeffrey Ogbar explains: “It was the Black Power movement that had some of the most visible influences on the radical activist struggles of Latinos, Asians, and Native Americans, giving rise to a visible movement of radical ethnic nationalism and new constructions of ethnic identity. Young activists of all backgrounds had been impressed and inspired by the militancy, political analysis, organization and symbolism of black nationalists and Black Power advocates.”14
A new vocabulary of hyphenated Americans would emerge, and members of these racialized groups would be both defining and defined by these new terms. America would become a nation of racialized interest groups, what Omi and Winant would call the “racial state.” Omi and Winant termed the creation of the racial state the “Great Transformation,” which “irreversibly expanded the terrain of political contest” and set in motion the array of identity-driven politics that form the national body politic today. This Great Transformation was a result of black power, and the focal point of black power politics and culture was the Black Panther Party, which combined political theater, social work, and urban warfare at the flashpoint of racial unrest in twentieth-century America.
The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, as it was originally called, was a multifaceted black revolutionary organization whose initial membership, while primarily from the urban working class, was composed of a broad cross-section of the San Francisco Bay Area’s African American community. Their early public actions (from 1966 to 1968) were designed to confront symbols of the power structure directly and to provide a critique and working alternative to the traditional nonviolent methods of protest. Cofounders Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale designed Party activities to impress new recruits with their fearlessness and willingness to die for the people. Their courageous stance sparked a rapid increase in membership and the establishment of more than thirty chapters across the country by the end of 1968.
Party membership transcended class or ideological barriers as many rank-and-file participants were introduced to an alternative communalistic lifestyle. During the early years this included weekly lessons in political education, or “P.E.” classes. This was the primary means of indoctrination/transformation of new recruits, to help turn “brothers off the block” into Black Panthers. There were codes of personal conduct, and most chapters offered forms of self-defense and firearms training. Party duties included work in the many “Survival Programs” such as the breakfast for children program and “liberation schools,” as well as production and distribution of the Black Panther paper, regular security detail, and participation in a wide range of community events. The commitment was extremely rigorous, as there were duties twenty-four hours a day, compounded by the constant threat of attack by law enforcement and, in later years, from rival black radical factions.
The Black Panther Party went through three distinct phases of its existence. The early years of 1966 through 1970 were characterized by projections of militarism and black nationalism, as well as an affection for socialism, a rapid growth in numbers, and a compelling presence in the American popular imagination. The second phase, from 1970 to 1973, can be characterized as a transitional period in which Party leader Huey P. Newton consolidated his power in Oakland, redirected the organization toward programs to serve the people, and sought to run Party leaders for elective office. The final stage, 1974 to 1982, involved the growth of a local infrastructure in Oakland, initially under the leadership of Elaine Brown, within the context of a gradual decline of black radical politics nationwide.
Despite being raised in black working-class families with little political education, the young Panther Party leaders re-created themselves as theoreticians and intellectuals of the revolution who daily engaged with the power structure on the streets as revolutionaries. Party members and supporters from all walks of life were able to identify with their leaders and to see themselves as analysts as well as agents in their revolutionary cause.
A number of young Panthers incorporated their artistic talents in the pursuit of their revolutionary dreams. Emory Douglas, who survived incarceration in a youth reform school by learning the printing trade, became involved with playwright and activist Amiri Baraka during Baraka’s visiting lectureship at San Francisco State in the spring of 1967. Douglas designed the sets for the traveling plays that Baraka and others would perform in the area. Douglas then worked with Bobby Seale to design the first editions of the Black Panther newspaper, and joined Seale and other Panthers on their famous visit to the Sacramento state capitol to protest pending gun restrictions. As minister of culture for the Black Panther Party, Douglas would design the vast majority of issues of the Black Panther through the 1980s. Through sharp and vivid imagery he celebrated the revolutionary warrior, and revolutionary ideals, while characterizing police and members of the power structure as filthy pigs. Douglas would become—and remains—a central figure in the propagation of the revolutionary ideology of the Black Panther Party.
Douglas designed the artwork on the first album release of Panther-based music by Elaine Brown, titled Seize the Time. In 1968 Elaine Brown, then a young Los Angeles chapter leader, began to write songs—revolutionary ballads—that she sang while playing the piano. In the crisis following the 1969 UCLA shoot-out in which Panthers John Huggins and Alprentice “Bunchy” Carter were killed, Elaine Brown sang some of her songs to a group of grieving Panthers that included David Hilliard. Hilliard anointed one of Brown’s songs (“The Meeting”) the Black Panthers’ national anthem and proclaimed that Brown should record her music for the revolution. Her album was recorded in Los Angeles under the guidance of iconoclastic jazz arranger Horace Tapscott. The album, Seize the Time, was a vivid representation of Panther Party ideals that included Brown’s written commentary as well as Douglas’s artwork. It was sold at Party functions and was advertised in the Black Panther as part of the Party’s early efforts to disseminate their message to the community through music. Elaine Brown’s music was compelling message music, sung as dramatically arranged ballads. Brown’s music, however, did not move with the rhythms of the streets: soul music.
Despite the cultural productions of Emory Douglas and Elaine Brown, the stoic Panther mythos lived on in the nation’s imagination. It is only through later revisions of the narrative that the Black Panthers’ image began a process of reconstruction that has revealed Party members to be the soul brothers and soul sisters that they were.
As a political history, Party Music offers an insider’s narrative of the Black Panther Party during its crucial transformative phase, 1969-1971. As a soul music history, Party Music explores the motives of many of the great artists and great songs performed during that tumultuous period. At a turning point in history, with many dramatic events playing out on the national stage, black power and soul music are explored as one resonant note, a scream actually, from the people themselves.
Some books are organized in a linear, chronological fashion. This book is not one of them. Party Music is structured along a set of songs performed by the Lumpen at a concert in Oakland in November 1970. The live Lumpen experience is an important element here. Their approach to soul music, and their skillful infusion of explicitly political lyrics onto established black popular music songs during their performances, presents us with an experience worthy of study in and of itself. Their approach went far beyond the use of gimmicks and chic radical slogans. The Lumpen transfused an entire rhythm and blues concert with the lifeblood of the revolution. Every lyric, every harmonized verse, every chant, every grunt, every shout carries a weight of meaning in their performance. Rather than transcribe an entire concert at once, each song of the evening is examined individually, as a guide to each chapter. All of the chapters begin with an immersion into the live Lumpen show, followed by a brief take on the original hit song the group had chosen to reinterpret and politicize. From there the discussion goes in many directions, from radical politics to music and culture and back again. Each chapter discussion is a deliberation on a theme inspired by a Lumpen song.
At this unique moment in time, a generation of spirited people were challenging the state, challenging the social order, taking up causes on their own, and initiating social change in a variety of ways. As the sage philosopher Bushwick Bill of the Geto Boys has said: “There are three types of people in the world: those who don’t know what happened, those who wonder what happened, and people on the streets like us who make things happen!” For those people who make things happen, here is their Party Music.