After two roaring upbeat numbers, the band slows things down and performs a ballad. The dancers step and sway in a slow, deliberate motion like their Motown soul music contemporaries.
A velvet-smooth guitar melody brings about the familiar sound of the Impressions’ “People Get Ready,” a standard of the civil rights movement. Veterans of the integrated marches can easily recite the well-worn lyrics to the original tune by Curtis Mayfield:
People get ready
there’s a train a comin’
you don’t need no ticket
just get on board
As the Lumpen’s rendition of the song takes shape, the softly moaning background harmonies and horn riffs provide a disarming, peaceful quality to the sound. Clearly this is a group in command of both upbeat and softer numbers. Bandleader William Calhoun addresses the crowd in a somber tone:
Before we, uh, dedicate this song, we make a special dedication tonight.
As you know we’re cutting live here at Merritt College.
We’d like to dedicate our entire album to the minister of defense, the supreme commander of the Black Panther Party, Huey P. Newton.
This announcement generates a burst of applause from the audience.
On this particular song we dedicate to Jonathan Jackson, to William Christmas, to James McClain, to Fred Hampton, Mark Clark, John Huggins, Alprentice “Bunchy” Carter. And to the brother that was the beginning, Little Bobby Hutton.
A loud burst of emotional applause follows for Lil’ Bobby.
To all revolutionaries …
To all revolutionaries that have given their lives to the cause of freedom throughout the world, we the Lumpen respectfully dedicate this song.
(Applause)
Yeah sing the song
Freedom wooo freedom
Won’t you sing about the most precious thing in this world:
We said people get ready
Revolution’s come
Your only ticket
Is a loaded gun
The audience shouts in laughter and approval.
Have courage my people
Have faith be strong
We’ll put the pigs
Where they belong—
I believe, oh, I believe
Bobby and the people
Must all be free!
The audience shouts its approval at this verse.
As songwriter William Calhoun recalls: “I liked what he [Mayfield] was trying to say in terms of the message, ‘People get ready.’ His, of course, was a more spiritual message. I was involved in the revolution. So my thing was ‘people get ready for the revolution.’ Curtis just gave me entrée to that.”1
We said people get ready
Revolution’s come
In freedom or death
We will not run—
Freedom or death
Let it be known
We’d rather die free
Than die one by one—
I believe oh I believe
Bobby and the people
Must all be free
(Shouts and applause)
There ain’t no time
To turn around
The place for all pigs
Six feet underground
We suffer so long
Now now now now we can see
We must kill those who stop us
From being free—
I believe, oh I believe (Say it loud)
Bobby and the people
Must all be free!
The final verse is sung slowly to a crescendo of applause from the audience.2
Part of the soul music aesthetic—which was composed of equal parts gospel morality and rhythm and blues energy—was that the artists to some extent lived the music that they sang, which served to reinforce the integrity of the message. It is in this context that the Lumpen were authentic to their audience as well as to the soul music tradition. One did not invoke a civil rights era standard such as “People Get Ready” unless one was serious about the message one intended to deliver.
The Lumpen paused to commemorate fallen revolutionary comrades on this song by the Impressions, a recording that served as a focal point of nonviolent civil rights movement activism. They acknowledged fallen Panthers in the Bay Area, Jonathan Jackson, James McClain, and William Christmas, killed during a siege of the Marin County courthouse on August 7, 1970; fallen Panthers in Los Angeles, John Huggins and Panther Party Southern California chapter founder Alprentice “Bunchy” Carter, killed by members of the black nationalist group Organization Us at UCLA on January 17, 1969; fallen Panthers in Chicago, Chicago party chairman Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, killed in a raid by Chicago Police on December 4, 1969; and the first recruit of the Party, Lil’ Bobby Hutton, killed after surrendering to Oakland police following a shootout on April 6, 1968. By acknowledging their fellow revolutionaries, the Lumpen were solidifying their own commitment to the cause they had pledged to support. They appropriated Curtis Mayfield’s masterpiece as their own anthem of uprising. This was not an accident. Calhoun recalls: “Anybody who was in support of the struggle was a friend; anybody else was a traitor, Uncle Tom, all the names we could put on people. And Curtis was certainly a friend. James Brown was for a while, until they bought him off. But Curtis Mayfield was somebody that we admired.”3
This chapter will explore the relationship between the development of soul music, the rise of black consciousness within the community, and the simultaneous explosion of black arts, radical black cultural production, and the transformation of black identities that took place during the late 1960s and early 1970s.
When the Impressions released “People Get Ready” in February 1965, the composition was considered a protest song of the highest order. “You don’t need no ticket, you just thank the Lord” is the catchphrase for all who want to join the freedom train. Harmonic and harmonious, the song was familiar and inspirational to all who heard it. The song crossed over that spring, reaching number three on the R&B charts and number fourteen on the pop charts. Craig Werner, in his book Higher Ground: Stevie Wonder, Aretha Franklin, Curtis Mayfield, and the Rise and Fall of American Soul, reflects on the impact of Mayfield’s soul masterpiece:
No song bore witness to the movement’s trials with greater depth than “People Get Ready,” which Mayfield said he wrote “in a deep mood, a spiritual state of mind.” … From the opening bars—a gospel hum carried along by bells, [Johnny] Pate’s beautiful horn chart, and Mayfield’s delicately syncopated guitar chording—the song pours a healing vision over a nation poised on the brink of chaos…. When the final strains of “People Get Ready” faded to silence, you could almost believe that, despite what was happening on the streets of Chicago and Detroit, the promise of the movement would be fulfilled.4
“People Get Ready” was designed to provide inspiration for those seeking to continue the struggle while appearing politically neutral in terms of direct references to the political realities of the day. The song remains a testament to the endurance of the civil rights marchers, as well as a tribute to the sounds of Chicago soul, to the music of the black church, to the blues tradition of coded protest music, and to the rich vein of resistance music within the black community.5
Curtis Mayfield had a long and respected career as a socially conscious artist whose work mirrored the state of affairs in black America throughout his thirty-five-plus years as a recording artist. Mayfield’s singing group, the Impressions, evolved from a collaboration between Jerry Butler and Mayfield, who both sang as teenagers in their church choir while living in Chicago’s Cabrini-Green housing projects. Their friendship led to the formation of a singing group, Jerry Butler and the Impressions, and the hit single, “For Your Precious Love,” in 1958. Butler then began a solo career while Mayfield backed him up on guitar, wrote arrangements, and learned the business. In 1960 Curtis Mayfield was ready to run the Impressions himself. At the time, Chicago was the home of the most popular and most polished black American pop singers, such as the legendary jazz crooner Nat “King” Cole, the gritty yet elegant Lou Rawls, and the former gospel singer turned emergent pop superstar Sam Cooke. Mayfield followed in the footsteps of Cooke, who understood the importance of owning his own music. So in 1961, in an industry rarity, Mayfield formed his own publishing company to protect the rights to his music.
Curtis Mayfield was a stylistic pioneer as well. He fashioned the group with his own gospel-influenced three-part vocal style (new to R&B at the time) of singing featherlight harmonies, backed with his own delicate guitar melodies. Mayfield’s subtly expressive guitar work is frequently mentioned as an inspiration for Jimi Hendrix. Despite a reputation for aggressive, dissonant, chaotic solos, Jimi Hendrix was also capable of exquisitely gentle musings, Mayfield’s forte.6
The new Impressions’ first hit singles were pop standards: “Gypsy Woman” in 1961, “It’s All Right” in 1963, “I’m So Proud” in 1964, and the uplifting, spiritually oriented “Keep On Pushing.” The following year, the group would enjoy pop notoriety with their energetic rendition of the traditional song “Amen,” which appeared in the award-winning Sidney Poitier film Lillies of the Field. “Amen” would not only win the group wide popular appeal (reaching number seven on the pop charts in early 1965), the song was also utilized as marching music for civil rights demonstrators.
During this time, demonstrators were taking gospel songs out of the churches and onto the streets. In many cases, the activists would transform a traditional gospel song into a freedom song.7 In 1962, members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) Cordell Reagon, Bernice Johnson (now Dr. Bernice Johnson Reagon), Charles Neblett, and Rutha Mae Harris founded their own singing group, the Freedom Singers, and toured the country singing freedom songs, expanding their organizing activities, and raising money for SNCC.8
Waldo E. Martin Jr., in his book No Coward Soldiers, posits that the use of song and the updating of the gospel were essential elements of the daily lives of the civil rights movement workers.
Throughout the South, “Woke Up This Morning with My Mind Stayed on Jesus” became “Woke Up This Morning with My Mind Stayed on Freedom.” “We are climbing Jacob’s ladder, Soldiers of the Cross” became “Do you, do you want your freedom, Soldiers of the CORE.” …
As the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. observed at the time, “The freedom songs are playing a strong and vital role in our struggle. They give the people new courage and a sense of unity. I think they keep alive a faith, a radiant hope, in the future, particularly in our most trying hours.”9
One young Mississippi family of gospel singers during that time played a role in the rise of soul music. Led by Roebuck “Pops” Staples, son Pervis, and daughters Mavis, Cleotha, and Yvonne, the family singing group the Staple Singers began recording gospel numbers in 1952 and were well established gospel music performers by the mid-1960s. But the tenor of the times compelled a move toward the movement and toward movement songs. As Mavis Staples recalled in 2007:
Pops saw Dr. Martin Luther King speak in 1963 and from there we started to broaden our musical vision beyond just gospel songs. Pops told us, “I like this man. I like his message. And if he can preach it, we can sing it.” So we started to sing “freedom songs,” like “Why Am I Treated So Bad,” “When Will We Be Paid for the Work We’ve Done,” “Long Walk to DC,” and many others. Like many in the civil rights movement, we drew on the spirituality and strength from the church to help gain social justice and to try to achieve equal rights.
It was a difficult and dangerous time (in 1965 we spent a night in jail in West Memphis, Arkansas, and I wondered if we’d ever make it out alive) but we felt we needed to stand up and be heard.10
The Staple Singers were certainly heard over the years. They would later sign with Memphis-based Stax Records and fuse their moral authority of gospel music with the strength of the rhythm sections at Stax to produce some of the most revered soul music of the 1970s, including “Respect Yourself,” “I’ll Take You There,” and many others. For the Staples family, and for a great many others, it was during those watershed years on the terrifying roads in the Deep South that soul music was born.
A wave of inspirational music with a message—which began on the streets as part of the struggle—was incorporated into black popular music recordings. The increasing popularity of black radio also played a role. In 1965 most of what was understood to be “black radio” was a series of small independent radio stations across the country that were typically owned by whites but that frequently featured music sets and playlists compiled by black DJs and black program directors. These radio stations and their on-air DJs were uniquely equipped to present popular black music, lifestyle, and culture, to comment on it, and to respond to community tastes. These stations were still profit-making institutions and as such were not overtly politically oriented. Nevertheless, the defiant, triumphant spirit of black popular music was carried across the air-waves—and across the racial divide.
Curtis Mayfield continued to write songs throughout the late 1960s that were inspired by, or directed toward, the black freedom movement. In early 1968 the Impressions’ recording of “We’re a Winner” was another breakthrough for Mayfield. The song was a departure from the veiled meanings in soul, as Mayfield sang, “And we’re a winner /And everybody knows it too / We’ll just keep on pushin’ / Like your leaders tell you to.” Rumors persist that the song was banned from numerous black radio stations because of its explicitly socially conscious lyrics (Mayfield referred to this on his 1971 live album), yet it still went to number one on the R&B charts and to number fourteen on the pop charts in the spring of 1968.11 Soon thereafter Mayfield went on to record as a solo artist who wrote, performed, arranged, and financed all of his music. In 1970 Mayfield released Curtis, an album of dissonant, extended, adventurous recordings with titles such as “(Don’t Worry) If There’s a Hell Below We’re All Going to Go,” “Move On Up,” “Miss Black America,” and “We People Who Are Darker Than Blue.” Mayfield’s music at this point had as much in common with the hard black rock and psychedelia of Jimi Hendrix and Funkadelic as it did with Chicago soul. Yet it was, like most of Mayfield’s work, eminently appropriate for the times.
In 1972 Mayfield produced his modern masterpiece, the Superfly movie soundtrack. Mayfield’s bittersweet lyrical portrayals of gangster life, along with irresistible hooks and melodies, set new standards for social commentary and solid groove. No longer harmonizing in a pressed blazer with his colleagues in the Impressions, Curtis Mayfield had put together a grooving funk band (à la Sly and the Family Stone) that included a prominent conga player, “Master” Henry Gibson. With Joseph “Lucky” Scott’s rich bass riffs and a tangy, melodic guitar tone supplied by Mayfield, the deep funk groves were irresistible. Mayfield’s Superfly soundtrack exploded ideas of what a black movie soundtrack was capable of. Mayfield’s “Pusherman” was a ghetto superstar who appeared to have no moral compass. Yet the lead character of the film, Priest, struggled to transcend the madness of the situation, as Mayfield captured so vividly.
Can’t be like the rest, is the most he’ll confess
but the time’s running out
and there’s no happiness.
After Mayfield, it was no longer possible for an artist to simply support a movie with a soundtrack, the task was to define it. Mayfield went on to write and produce many more soundtrack albums.
Despite his status as an icon of soul music, Mayfield did not make the jump to major-label success—or into the superficialities of disco in the later 1970s. Mayfield’s staunch independence earned him respect if not financial rewards, and he continued to record thoughtful soul music on independent labels and to perform regularly. On August 14, 1990, he was paralyzed after a stage accident in Brooklyn in which a lighting rig collapsed on him. Paralyzed from the neck down, Mayfield still continued to write and record music. Lying flat for hours just to exhale a verse, Mayfield recorded his final album in 1996: New World Order. Mayfield passed away in 1999. His honorable approach to black music is recognized the world over as the gold standard for soul and for social consciousness as an artist.
While Mayfield is the preeminent figure in the rise of what was known as Chicago soul, he also collaborated with arranger Johnny Pate to create a line of memorable hits for some of Chicago’s best soul singers: the Impressions, Jackie Wilson, Jerry Butler, Gene Chandler, the Chi-Lites, Barbara Acklin, and Tyrone Davis. Eugene Record’s group the Chi-Lites went on to become one of the most popular soul groups in the 1970s with the popular hits “Have You Seen Her,” “Stone Out of My Mind,” and “Oh Girl.” Their third album, released in 1970, was steeped in social consciousness, as the title song, the hard-driving “(For God’s Sake) Give More Power to the People,” was an overture to the well-known slogan of the Black Panthers. “That was the song of the times, that’s why we recorded it,” Marshall Thompson of the Chi-Lites recalls.12
The rich vein of popular music was influenced by the strength of black cultural institutions in Chicago, from the early black-owned jazz clubs in the 1920s to the Nation of Islam, which has been headquartered in Chicago since the 1930s. Chicago was and is the home of some of the most enduring popular black creative and artistic institutions. The Johnson Publishing Company’s publications of Ebony (since 1945) and Jet (since 1951) have informed and entertained black America for generations. The popular, long-running dance program, Soul Train, founded in 1970 by Don Cornelius, began in Chicago (with a loan from the Johnson publishers) before moving to Los Angeles in 1972. Chess Records, founded by the Polish émigrés Leonard Chess and his brother, Philip, was the predominant blues label in the 1950s and introduced to the world the great stars Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf, along with rock and roll pioneer Chuck Berry. In the 1960s a number of young multi-instrumentalists would take the reins at Chess as musical directors of the label, developing artists such as Etta James, Ramsey Lewis, and Minnie Riperton with a broad range of styles and influences from jazz to psychedelic to soul. Two of these musical directors, Charles Stepney and Maurice White, would have an immeasurable impact on the music of the 1970s, writing and producing for one of the most elaborate yet popular and accessible bands of all time: Earth, Wind & Fire.
Chicago was also the hotbed of some of the most strident Black Nationalist jazz music of the day. Collectives such as Philip Cohran’s African Heritage Ensemble, the Pharoahs, and the Art Ensemble of Chicago pushed and reflected the militancy of the streets of black Chicago with a combination of exotic, expansive instrumental music and a fiercely independent business sense. The jazz artists organized themselves into the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), and, like their soul counterparts Cooke and Mayfield, sought complete financial control of their music. Their vision, encapsulated in their mission statement, was “Great Black Music, Ancient to the Future.” The most esoteric jazz musician of all time, Herman Poole Blount, aka Sun Ra, spent the post-World War II years developing his intergalactic afrofuturist worldview while working in Chicago. (Sun Ra would later wind up in Oakland, at the invitation of Bobby Seale, living in a house owned by the Black Panther Party. Sun Ra spent the spring semester of 1971 “lecturing” for a course at UC-Berkeley in the music department titled “The Black Man in the Cosmos.”)13
Many of the jazz groups, as well as artists of all persuasions, frequented the Affro-Arts Theater, a former movie house on Thirty-Ninth Street and Pershing Road in Chicago. Philip Cohran, who played with Sun Ra until Ra’s exodus to New York in 1961, developed the Affro-Arts into one of the most prolific outposts of Black Nationalist cultural production in the region. The center offered art exhibits, film showings, plays, dance classes, lectures, poetry readings, and performances by artists such as Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Oscar Brown Jr., and Gwendolyn Brooks. It billed itself as “the only continuous valid black experience in the midwestern sector of the United States.”14
Through the AACM and Affro-Arts, the Chicago jazz artists of the late 1960s used the independent, self-contained model of music-business operation that characterized the work of their Chicago predecessors. During the 1920s, before the intrusion of the Chicago mobsters, black jazz club owners provided a prominent social and economic model of independence. The radical artists of the 1960s sought to be similarly self-determined, and they designed youth music-education workshops, produced and performed their own concerts, managed financial collectives, and started up publishing companies for their work. These creative endeavors were inseparably linked to the political life in Chicago, which was equally self-determinist.15
For generations, Chicago politics have been characterized by a succession of bold power consolidations. From Al Capone’s gangsters in the 1920s to the Richard J. Daley political machine in the 1960s, power has always been negotiated in plain sight. For years Daley kept control of the city through a tightly organized system of precinct patronage, where street-level vote organizers were given city jobs. His iron grip on Democratic Party politics meant he was rarely challenged in the electoral arena, and his ties to organized crime helped him to establish an impenetrable power base in the streets.
Martin Luther King Jr. had little chance to organize his northern civil rights movement in Chicago. Craig Werner explains how Daley dealt with King’s overtures to the established black leadership in Chicago:
Supported by the black political submachine, Daley simply employed the machine’s standard tactics. If a minister offered anything more than rhetorical support to the Chicago movement, the city would dispatch inspectors with the power to condemn church property. If a businessman backed King, city permits or garbage collection would become a problem for him. Faced with a choice between supporting King and accepting grants to continue their programs most neighborhood activists took the money.16
The black middle class was beholden to the white power structure, and the entire city was organized in similar fashion. To assert political independence within this context was a radical gesture. As a result, Black Nationalists, from the Nation of Islam to the Black Panther Party, were highly organized within this space. Even the street gangs, such as the Blackstone Rangers and the Vice Lords organized themselves in sophisticated multitiered alliances—among each other, with Black Nationalists such as the Panthers briefly, and with the government in exchange for jobs and community grants. Power was sliced up like raw meat in Chicago, and people organized to obtain it.
Jesse Jackson’s organizing efforts were centered in Chicago. After a year of study at the Chicago Theological Seminary in 1964, South Carolina native Jackson marched with and was mentored by Martin Luther King Jr. In 1966 King dispatched the twenty-two-year-old Jackson to head the Chicago chapter of Operation Breadbasket, which was organized to move blacks and their supporters toward “selective buying.” This form of boycott was meant to pressure white businesses to integrate and hire blacks, and to eliminate obstacles to black business relationships. Jackson was at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis when King was gunned down on April 4, 1968, and his ambition in the wake of King’s death was a concern to older civil rights organizers. Jackson, however, was among the first of the mainstream civil rights leaders to adapt to the black power rhetoric, to don African garb, wear an Afro, and generally ingratiate himself to the youth that adhered to the popular black styles and trends.
Jackson’s falling out in 1971 with King’s successor Ralph Abernathy led to Jackson’s formation of his own organization, People United to Save Humanity, or Operation PUSH. The Chicago-based PUSH sought a legitimate claim as an heir to King’s national organizational clout by developing similar selective-buying campaigns. However, despite Jackson’s charisma and appeal and the Black Nationalist tenor of the times, PUSH was unable to capture the imagination of mainstream black America (or the working poor, since PUSH was an integrated organization) to generate an economic impact on a national scale.
The Chicago chapter of the Black Panther Party was founded in late 1967 by Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee organizer Bob Brown. Early in 1968 Fred Hampton, a young, charismatic NAACP officer fresh out of high school, joined the Party. Within months Hampton was the leader of the organization and had aroused the interest of the national Party offices—as well as the federal government. Hampton was able to internalize and present fundamental elements of the Party platform and convince many followers of their value. In addition to developing the People’s Clinic, a free breakfast program, and a police-monitoring program, Hampton sought alliances with various black street gangs as well as the predominantly white Students for a Democratic Society. In 1969 Hampton was a key player in organizing the first Rainbow Coalition, an activist coalition that included the Puerto Rican Young Lords’ Chicago chapter and the predominantly white Young Patriots. It was clear that Hampton could produce results that matched his revolutionary rhetoric.
With Fred Hampton’s dynamic oratory and visionary leadership captivating the black population in Chicago, the Party became a nonne-gotiable threat to the power apparatus of the city. The FBI infiltrated the Chicago Party chapter with an informant who became Hampton’s bodyguard. After failed attempts to bribe or coerce Hampton into petty crimes, the order went down to escalate the operation. At 4:00 AM on December 4, 1969, the state and local police raided Hampton’s bedroom at the Party headquarters and executed him.
The murder of Fred Hampton, perhaps more than any other single event associated with the Black Panther Party, garnered public sympathy across a broad range of the general society. Such a lawless act committed by law enforcement against someone seen as having such integrity generated a consistent reaction of outrage across the spectrum of the social justice movement. Clayton Riley wrote a postscript to Hampton’s death in the Liberator, a New York-based black radical magazine that had essentially ignored the Panthers until Hampton’s murder:
The face of Fred Hampton, alive so recently, dead so easily, keeps smiles from many faces. And mine.
One day, if this nation lives long enough, and grows up enough, we will be forced to confront these times and the Panthers. We will have to face them as truly avant heroes. Whom we killed because we had no room in this nation for the heroism of those who sought social change. We will face as well our own mediocrity as a reasoned explanation for the massacre of men and women who were, whatever the nature or soundness of their politics, bigger people than we allow to live here.17
Hampton’s murder resonated throughout the city and the nation. Popular music responded in kind. Curtis Mayfield’s first recording after the death of Hampton was his uncompromising, dissonant, politically charged solo album, Curtis, which featured the blistering opening track “(Don’t Worry) If There’s a Hell Below, We’re All Going to Go.” The softer tones of Chicago soul were no more. When the Chicago-based Chi-Lites produced their 1970 album title song, “(For God’s Sake) Give More Power to the People,” only months after Hampton’s murder, it was a popular acknowledgment of the leadership and inspiration of the Black Panther Party in Chicago and nationwide.
Soul-singing superstar Chaka Khan was an acquaintance of Hampton’s. She recalled Hampton’s demeanor in her autobiography, Chaka:
I remember wondering if Fred ever had a good belly laugh, ever cut up and clowned around. For all I know, perhaps he did in private. But whenever I saw him, he was in “movement mode.” He was like an army sergeant. Not that I ever saw him be cruel to anyone. He might put a friendly arm around your shoulder by way of encouragement—”Hello, Sister Chaka”—but he wasn’t about a lot of chitchat. Fred was all about “the struggle.”18
For herself, Chaka Khan was also swept into the Black Nationalist milieu. She volunteered for the Black Panther Party in high school, worked the breakfast for children program, and performed at local black cultural centers along with her sister.
Those were desperate, angry times. We had lived through years of civil rights movement fatalities, with the slayings of Evers, Malcolm, and King at the top of the litany. By the late 1960s, many of us had serious doubts that we would overcome the police brutality and all the other nigger treatment by moral suasion.19
Born Yvette Marie Stevens in 1953 in Great Lakes, Illinois, twenty miles north of Chicago, the young Stevens was raised on the South Side of Chicago and spent her spare time reading voraciously and taking singing classes. One day at the Affro-Arts Cultural Center, she was given the name Chaka Adunne Aduffe Yemoja Hodarhi Karifi by a Yoruba priest. At the time, name changes were a part of a coming-of-age ritual that was commonplace among counterculture youth. After a brief marriage to a local musician known as Hassan Khan, she shortened her name to Chaka Khan. She expanded her musical tastes from Motown-style harmonies to eclectic rock and psychedelic-influenced soul music, hooking up with the legendary Baby Huey and the Babysitters. At close to four hundred pounds and intensely expressive, Baby Huey (born James Ramey) emerged as an instant local star but died in October 1970 at the age of twenty-six. Shortly thereafter Khan went on to front the integrated rock-funk band Rufus, which would become her vehicle for obtaining stardom as a lead singer, songwriter, and funk queen. Upon moving to Los Angeles, the group scored years of pop success as Rufus featuring Chaka Khan in the 1970s, and Khan become a household name as a pop singer in the 1980s with songs such as “I’m Every Woman” and “What Cha’ Gonna Do for Me.”
Chaka Khan, however, was a youth organizer and member of the Black Panther Party back in 1969. As a young activist she faced a turning point in her own black militant career that was perhaps not unlike many other youths of her time. She came into possession of a gun and was tormented by all that it represented. She writes in her autobiography:
So there I was selling The Black Panther on street corners. I was also heading up a free-breakfast program for children in an old South Side church. And one day I was in possession of a gun. It wasn’t a Panther’s gun. It belonged to a security guard at Loop [junior college] …. I kept that gun for months, toying with the idea of doing something radical….
I was starting to have my doubts that the BPP approach could maintain. I started to see that “The Power,” “The Man” grew strong on our anger, on chaos, on divisions—black/white, men/women, old/young. What could my one gun do against that? …
I was thinking that maybe I just needed to finish high school and figure out what to do with my life. As for the gun, I hurled that sucker into the University of Chicago’s Botany Pond. Immediately, I felt free. Not long after that, … I got a call from a BPP comrade. Fred Hampton was dead.20
Chaka Khan was not alone. There were thousands of young people making choices about their role in the movement. Singing superstar Natalie Cole was drawn to the Black Panthers as part of her youth rebellion and worked at the breakfast for children program at the University of Massachusetts. But hers was as a result of a different kind of search: “I totally rebelled…. I stole, I drank, I discovered drugs. I discovered a black identity and separated myself from upper-class society. I became a Black Panther advocate and had the Afro and the dashiki—oh yes, all of that. And somehow, in the midst of that, I discovered that I could sing a little.”21 In the case of Natalie Cole, and likely thousands of searching youths, the Black Panthers represented a tangible alternative to the establishment, something they could not simply run away from, but something to run toward.
The life choices of Chaka Khan and Natalie Cole were a result of a particular cultural milieu that provided choices that were filled with idealism and the potential energy of imminent social change. Their generation was afforded the rare privilege of acting upon those ideals. The culture surrounding Natalie Cole’s rebellious impulses and Chaka Khan’s brush with militancy was a soul culture—one that celebrated blackness across classes and regions, which encouraged black youth—and all blacks at this moment—to explore the meaning of their role in social change collectively.
The phenomena of soul and soul music emerged in the black popular imagination just as the black freedom movement was taking shape. In many ways soul was representative of the growing unity of purpose among black Americans that surged in the post-WWII era. Jazz musicians used the phrases “soul” and “soul brother” as references to their musical and cultural values in the early 1950s. The word was a catchall for what “blackness” supposedly meant for all blacks—urban, hip, and decidedly nonwhite. This emergent new black aesthetic in the jazz community took on a variety of names, including bebop, hard bop, cool, soul, and funk. The notion of soul transcended the music, as LeRoi Jones wrote in Blues People in 1963:
Soul music, as the hard bop style is often called, does certainly represent for the Negro musician a “return to the roots.” Or not so much a return as a conscious re-evaluation of those roots…. The step from cool to soul is a form of social aggression. It is an attempt to place upon a “meaningless” social order, an order which would give value to terms of existence that were once not only valueless but shameful. Cool meant non-participation; soul means a “new” establishment.22
The idea that soul brothers—and soul sisters—possessed something unique and special on their own terms was a major shift in consciousness, and it was a public confirmation of a shift in consciousness that was taking place throughout the black American community. Jazz musicians were on the front lines of the black consciousness movement and they initiated the musical movement of soul, but it was the popular performers who brought a new, all-encompassing sense of blackness to the masses.
Soul was as much a part of the movement as marches, speeches, and arrests. In 1965 the Black Arts movement writer Roland Snellings (now Askia Muhammad Touré), writing in the Liberator, was inspired to the point that he unabashedly thought to militarize rhythm and blues well before the direct protest song was a common part of the black social justice lexicon.
This social Voice of Rhythm and Blues is only the beginning of the end. Somewhere along the line, the “Keep On Pushin’ “ in song, in Rhythm and Blues is merging with the Revolutionary dynamism of COLTRANE of ERIC DOLPHY of BROTHER MALCOLM of YOUNG BLACK GUERILLAS STRIKING DEEP INTO THE HEARTLAND OF THE WESTERN EMPIRE. The Fire is spreading, the Fire is spreading, the Fire made from the merging of dynamic Black Music (Rhythm and blues, Jazz) with politics (GUERILLA WARFARE) is spreading like black oil flaming in Atlantic shipwrecks spreading like Black Fire….
WE are moving forward, WE are on the move, WE record it all in Rhythm and Blues, New Jazz Black Poetry, WE—the Captive Nation listening to its priests and wisemen; growing stronger; donning Black Armor to get the job done so Rhythm and blues can once again sing about “Love,” “mellow” black women and happy children: after it sings this Empire to the grave, after it sings the Sun of the Spirit back into the lonely heart of man.23
Through the medium of music, and his own zeal, Snellings was able to capture the spirit of oncoming change that was in the air. His energy and anticipation was high because he could feel a new phase of a people’s movement on the horizon. Just as civil rights was transforming into black power, it was becoming clear to many that a movement was heading toward a revolution.
The Black Arts movement (BAM) was the name given to the explosion of radical black cultural production that emerged from black America in the mid-1960s. Black art created with revolutionary, nationalist ferver was the order of the day. Any opportunity to celebrate and encourage blackness, all things African, and to denounce all things white and Western was taken full advantage of. The goal was a revolution in black consciousness among the people. To accomplish this, young radicals wrote and published plays, poems, short stories, and novels, choreographed dances, designed visual art, produced films, and claimed spaces on the street and in public spaces to do so. They wrote politically incisive (as well as racially inflammatory) articles and prose in black newspapers such as the Amsterdam News and upstart Black Nationalist publications such as Freedomways, Umbra, and the Liberator. They sought to create and maintain a black aesthetic in their works and to inspire a rejection of Western constructs of value, relevance, and sophistication.
Although it was a national phenomenon, the Black Arts movement is mostly associated with the New York City-area stable of writers, critics, playwrights, visual artists, scholars, communists, and jazz aficionados that included LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), Roland Snellings (Askia Touré), Larry Neal, Sonia Sanchez, Nikki Giovanni, Calvin Hernton, David Henderson, Harold Cruse, and many others.
They were spurned forward in Harlem by the black pride and discipline displayed by members of the Nation of Islam, and the anticolonial liberation movements such as those of Patrice Lumumba in the Congo, Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana, Nelson Mandela in South Africa, Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam, and Cuba’s Fidel Castro (who visited Harlem in 1960). They witnessed the increasingly violent confrontations of the civil rights movement, the incipient urban riots (Birmingham 1963, Harlem 1964), and the daily news of anticolonial warfare. They felt the forceful denunciations of white supremacy and of Negro leaders by Malcolm X; they felt the raw soul music on the radio and the dissonant unbounded sounds of Black Nationalist jazz sweeping through the air. In a few short years, a spirited new generation would pass through the clouds of discontent that would explode into a storm of cultural production.
Many of the young movement writers considered jazz to be their muse. Malcolm X was a key proponent of the jazz aesthetic and was among the many celebrants of the jazz culture who would illustrate how the music could help blacks to free themselves from Westernization and create new directions for their people. He spoke of this at his announcement of the creation of the Organization of Afro-American Unity held at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem on June 28, 1964:
I’ve seen it happen. I’ve seen black musicians when they’d be jamming at a jam session with white musicians—a whole lot of difference. The white musician can jam if he’s got some sheet music in front of him. He can jam on something that he’s heard jammed before. If he’s heard it, then he can duplicate it or he can imitate it or he can read it. But that black musician, he picks up his horn and starts blowing some sounds that he never thought of before. He improvises, he creates, it comes from within. It’s his soul, it’s that soul music. It’s the only area on the American scene where the black man has been free to create. And he has mastered it. He has shown that he can come up with something that nobody ever thought of on his horn.
Well, likewise he can do the same thing if given intellectual independence. He can come up with a new philosophy. He can come up with a philosophy that nobody has heard of yet. He can invent a society, a social system, an economic system, a political system, that is different from anything that exists or has ever existed anywhere on this earth. He will improvise; he’ll bring it from within himself. And this is what you and I want.24
Malcolm X used the metaphor of black musical creativity to fashion a vision of an entirely liberated black civilization. This essential link was the centerpiece of Black Arts ideology. His words inspired a generation of artists and activists to believe in the inherent value and revolutionary potential of their works. If it was black, from black, for black, about black, then it was a part of a greater vision of black liberation. A generation of black cultural workers were transformed by the uncompromising clarity and forcefulness of Malcolm X’s love of blackness, and these artists sought to remain true to his word.
Musically, echoes of Malcolm X could be heard at every urban jazz club and dusty juke joint across the country. To a great deal of Black Arts movement aficionados, many confluent movements toward liberation from the constraints and constructs of Western art and culture were taking place on stage and on the records of Albert Ayler, Archie Shepp, Max Roach, Charles Mingus, Cecil Taylor, Ornette Coleman, and John Coltrane. Especially John Coltrane. In his book Freedom Is, Freedom Ain’t: Jazz and the Making of the Sixties, Scott Saul describes the almost spiritual deification young black radicals gave to both John Coltrane and Malcolm X:
While Coltrane was loath to attach his music to a specific political ideology, preferring a language of universal spirituality, he became posthumously an icon of a uniquely black epistemology….
Although Coltrane and Malcolm X may seem to be opposite figures in disparate universes—the first apolitical and seemingly disconnected from the actual groundswell of the freedom movement, the second firebreathing in his politics and seemingly disconnected from the world of the arts—they did share a broad cultural connection. Both became icons of integrity, figures of an uncompromising and uncolonized black selfhood.25
To be able to represent oneself as uncolonized was an important ideal for many of the Black Arts movement practitioners, particularly in the racially stratified and congested urban northeastern cities.
Most of the early Black Arts movement visionaries were college educated, and many were veterans of military conscription. Their hostile, disorienting experiences within the most rigid artifices of the Western social structure (the academy and the military) were both crushing and inspiring in the same way that a repressive Catholic-school upbringing might lead one to a rebellion of hedonism and indulgence. This newest of the New Negro to come out of this milieu was defiantly, obnoxiously, preposterously Black.
The revolutionary spirit in the air in 1965 inspired LeRoi Jones to found a uniquely oriented artistic cultural center in Harlem, which he called the Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School (BARTS). BARTS was a watershed because of its unabashed blackness, its vision, and its central geography as a locus of activity and possibility. The focused black culture that was being celebrated was a model for other interested black imaginers, and the model was duplicated all over the country. In Detroit it was the Shrine of the Black Madonna Cultural Center, in San Francisco it was the Black House, in Chicago it was the Affro-Arts Theater, and there were dozens more that were lesser known yet just as functional. Kalamu Ya Salaam, in his book The Magic of JuJu: An Appreciation of the Black Arts Movement, clarifies the truly nationwide nature of the Black Arts movement, which he defines as “an artistic manifestation of the collective Black Power-oriented political activity that happened in the sixties and seventies.” Ya Salaam explains that there were regional centers of BAM activity that interacted with national trends and then reinvigo-rated their local centers in a local-national-local process. According to Ya Salaam, the key geographical focal points of BAM were:
The West Coast Bay Area, which produced the seminal journals Soulbook, Black Dialogue, and the Journal of Black Poetry; Chicago/ Detroit, which produced Negro Digest/Black World, Third World Press, and Black Books Bulletin, as well as OBAC [Organization of Black American Culture] in Chicago and Broadside Press in Detroit; New York/New Ark (Newark, NJ), which produced BART/S, New Lafayette, and the National Black Theatre in New York, and Spirit House Movers and Jihad Press in New Ark; and New Orleans, home base for the Free Southern Theatre, which traveled throughout the Deep South and influenced the development of BAM activities from Florida to Texas.26
Cultural centers sprang up nationwide in homes and offices, church facilities and union halls, in abandoned buildings and on public school and university properties. For these cultural centers to thrive, Black Arts and black artists and black idealists packed the spaces with their wares, their visions, and their energies. In a fundamental way, the Black Arts movement was the cultural dimension to the black power movement.
The artistic production at these sites went hand in hand with the personal transformations taking place individually and collectively in the same spaces. High school and college age black youth were exploring and debating identity in a variety of ways, such as the high-volume debate at Howard University in 1966 when their homecoming queen, Robin Gregory, sported an Afro hairstyle.27 The exhilarating episode of glamour and aesthetic confrontation was credited with sparking a wave of student activism on the campus.
Assata Shakur, the former Black Panther and steadfast black revolutionary now living in exile in Cuba, described with delight in her autobiography, Assata, her early encounters with black cultural organizations during this heady time. Her encounter with the Republic of New Afrika (RNA) was typical. This organization, founded in Detroit by brothers Milton and Richard Henry (now Gaidi Obadele and Imari Obadele), advocated the establishment of a separate black nation within US borders to be made up of South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana. The premise was both preposterous and at the same time eminently reasonable, considering the radical politics of the day. With the development of a new iconography (the red, black, and green flag, for example) and defiantly African-inspired new cultural practices, the RNA provided a new space to “recover” blackness. Shakur explained her experience:
The first time i attended a Republic of New Afrika event, i drank in the atmosphere and enjoyed the easy audacity of it all. The surroundings were gay and carnival-like. A group of brothers were pounding out Watusi, Zulu, and Yoruba messages on the drums…. Vibrant sisters and brothers with big Afros and flowing African garments strolled proudly up and down the aisles. Bald-headed brothers, wearing combat boots and military uniforms with leopard-skin epaulets, stood around with their arms folded, looking dangerous. Little girls running and laughing, their heads wrapped with galees, tiny little boys wearing tiny little dashikis. People calling each other names like Jamal, Malik, Kisha, or Aiesha.
“Peace, sister,” a voice said. “Do you wanna be a citizen?”
“What?” i asked, without the slightest notion of what she was talking about.
“A citizen,” she repeated. “Do you want to be a citizen of the Republic of New Afrika?”28
The Black Arts movement was as much about cultural production as it was about the lived experience of blackness at the moment of revolutionary change. Another example of this is the way Assata Shakur, born JoAnne Chesimard, came to change her name:
The name JoAnne began to irk my nerves. I had changed a lot and moved to a different beat, felt like a different person. It sounded so strange when people called me JoAnne. It really had nothing to do with me. I didn’t feel like no JoAnne, or no Negro, or no amerikan. I felt like an African woman. From the time i picked my hair out in the morning to the time i slipped off to sleep with Mingus in the background, i felt like an African woman and rejoiced in it. My big, abstract black and white inkblot-looking painting was replaced by paintings of Black people and revolutionary posters…. My whole life was moving to African rhythms. My mind, heart, and soul had gone back to Africa, but my name was still stranded in Europe somewhere.29
A strong part of the attraction of Africa came from the increasingly visible presence of African culture in black communities. Visits from African dignitaries and celebrities became more frequent at social functions and entertainment venues. An interest in African music created openings for African musicians to take their recreational and ritual activities into the realm of performance and become popular doing so.
In the mid-1950s a Nigerian graduate student named Babatunde Olatunji developed a touring drum ensemble as he was taking breaks from study at New York University. The local performances were so striking that Olatunji was recruited by music executive John Hammond and signed to Columbia records. Olatunji’s 1960 release Drums of Passion—a drum chorus of raw rhythm—was a defining moment in the growing African influence on black musicians in jazz, soul, and pop. Universally acclaimed, Olatunji performed at President John F. Kennedy’s 1961 inauguration and the 1963 March on Washington. His influence was strong on jazz musicians such as Yusef Lateef and, in particular, John Coltrane, whose compositions “Africa,” “Gold Coast,” “Tunji,” and “Dahomey Dance” were all examples of a new worldliness exhibited by the most adventurous of black jazz musicians. Coltrane was an avid Olatunji disciple. “John Coltrane became my number one fan, and didn’t hide it,” Olatunji recalled in his autobiography, To the Beat of My Drum. “He told me in no uncertain terms, ‘I really admire what you’ve been doing. Every chance I get, I come to see and hear you. And when I do, I listen close to every move you make, everything you play. So one day I want to come a little nearer and learn something from you.’ “30 Coltrane’s collaboration with and generous financial support of Olatunji led to the foundation of the Olatunji Institute in 1964 in Harlem, where Olatunji taught African drumming, dance, and language to patrons of all walks of life. John Coltrane’s final recorded performance took place at the Olatunji Institute in April 1967. The available recording of the performance is somewhat ragged and discordant. Yet the overarching purpose of wedding African rhythms to American jazz improvisation would become a fundamental element in modern black music, particularly funk. According to Olatunji, the two had planned a national tour to initiate “Olatunji Centers” for African cultural learning across the country. Tragically, only months later John Coltrane died of liver cancer on July 17, 1967.
The impact of Babatunde Olatunji and his recording of Drums of Passion was enormous. Olatunji summed up the impact of his groundbreaking record:
Drums of Passion played a significant role in all the social change taking place around that time. It was the first percussion album to be recognized as an African contribution to the music of African Americans. It also came right at the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement. This meant we were recognized as pioneers in the “Black is Beautiful” movement. The whole idea of “black power” came along at this time, too. And so did the wearing of the dashiki and natural hair.
We found ourselves right in the middle of this, going from one rally to another, sponsored by different organizations fighting for freedom. From the NAACP to CORE to SNCC to the Black Muslims. This era was so full of excitement and challenges to everybody who was alive and part of it, black or white.31
The times were ripe for any and all things African to be appropriated and appreciated by a black public lusting for an identity beyond the “Negro.” In 1960 the popular South African vocalist Miriam Makeba came to the United States and was instantly swept up in the American pop music world, appearing on such mainstream television vehicles as The Ed Sullivan Show and The Steve Allen Show. Her lighthearted mix of Western and traditional Xhosa (“click”) vocalizing, African dress, and humble style, backed by a familiar-looking, Westernized R&B/ pop backup band was an appealing mix for American fans. Makeba’s popularity was a point of frustration for her South African government, however, which exiled her. Makeba’s engaging presence and comfortably worn natural hairstyle became a cause célèbre among a growing number of style-conscious African Americans in the early part of the 1960s. In her memoir, Makeba: My Story, Makeba makes light of the fact that her natural hair influenced a trend that would become a cultural icon in a few short years.
People wear furs and arrive in fancy cars because they have not seen anything like me. I don’t wear any makeup. My hair is very short and natural. Soon I see other black women imitate the style, which is no style at all, but just letting our hair be itself. They call the look the “Afro.”32
Makeba’s path was influenced by two of the most compelling personalities of the era: the activist leader Stokely Carmichael, whom she married in 1968, and entertainer Harry Belafonte, who sparked her career in the early 1960s. Makeba’s marriage to the controversial Carmichael was an inspiration to some who saw the two as a symbol of independent African royalty, but the union caused problems for Makeba’s musical career, as venues that once begged her to perform later refused to book her because of Carmichael’s defiant black power position and his volatile relationship with the US government. But Makeba’s career would have its greatest surge as a result of the universally popular Harry Belafonte.
Harry Belafonte was one of the most important activist-artists of the era. The Harlem-born Jamaican was an early Calypso superstar and an actor who played alongside Dorothy Dandridge in the famous all-black musical Carmen Jones in 1954. Belafonte was one of the first post-World War II black superstars, and certainly one of the few African American entertainers to fully engage as an activist as well. Bela-fonte’s iconic 1956 “Banana Boat Song,” with its memorable chant of “day-o,” was a celebration of Caribbean delights, and it offered Belafonte entrée to the American mainstream, which he has used to maximum effect throughout his stellar career. In the early 1960s, at the height of his influence, Belafonte took Miriam Makeba and black folksinger Odetta under his wing and toured with them, bringing an authentic ethnic presence to the American mainstream. At the same time, Bela-fonte supported and frequently underwrote Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee activities, often funding them directly. Belafonte was known to literally fly to SNCC actions with a bag of cash to be deposited in support of their efforts. Belafonte was an outspoken supporter of civil rights and one of the few visible supporters of ostracized entertainer-activist Paul Robeson during Robeson’s troubles with the US government. As Belafonte’s recording dropped off, he faded from view as a pop icon, but his impact on the culture and the politics of the black revolution was enormous.
The crossover appeal of Belafonte’s Caribbean pop music was only the beginning of a growing affection for emerging Afro-diasporic music. Percussion-driven “Latinized” dance music emerged on the pop and R&B charts in the early sixties with Mongo Santamaria’s rendition of Herbie Hancock’s “Watermelon Man” and Ray Barretto’s “El Watusi,” both of which sparked popular dance crazes. A cottage industry of Latinizing popular tunes became profitable for many artists, satisfying audiences of all races. The Afro-Latin fusion of soul in the city was perhaps best celebrated in the summer of 1971 when the Queen of Soul herself, Aretha Franklin, released her tome to the neighborhoods, celebrating “a rose in black in Spanish Harlem,” with her delightfully Latinized smash hit “Spanish Harlem.”
If one person epitomizes the aesthetics of soul, it is the Queen of Soul herself, Aretha Franklin. The daughter of a well-known Detroit preacher, Reverend C. L. Franklin, Aretha Franklin possessed a trumpet of a voice and a soulful spirit that defined a generation through her songs. Well-established standards such as “Respect,” “Chain of Fools,” “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman,” and “I Never Loved a Man (the Way I Love You)” were all chart-topping, soul-stirring smash hits for Franklin in the late 1960s. Her singing had a spiritual strength that sent her audiences into another world of emotional uplift. To witness Aretha Franklin was to experience pure soul at its utmost.
Aretha Franklin’s striking sound and dramatic personal evolution parallels the rise and fall of the civil rights and black power movements. Born in Memphis in 1942, Franklin was raised in Detroit in a religious family with an extended network of surrogate parents. She had two children by the age of sixteen. She was nevertheless nurtured in her father’s church, where her voice was a siren, and Aretha, it was clear, was headed toward stardom. Seeking to break out of the confines of the church, Aretha quickly signed a recording deal with Columbia Records in 1960 at the age of eighteen. Aretha worked with producers in New York who attempted to craft her into a jazz and pop singer in the mold of Aretha’s early mentor, Dinah Washington.
The resulting Columbia output, while reconsidered recently, was out of character for the powerful, gospel-trained, musically skilled young woman. For six years and eight albums, Aretha was told what to sing and how to sing the songs, stifling her unrivaled torch of a voice. In much the same way that the civil rights movement was constrained by benevolent supporters early on, it would take another act of liberation for Aretha to truly find herself.
Upon the completion of her Columbia contract in 1966, Aretha was signed by Jerry Wexler of Atlantic Records. Atlantic was based in New York, though it had strong ties to southern rock, soul, and country recording studios. Wexler took Aretha to the Fame studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, gave her a studio full of intuitive (predominantly white) southern session players, and let her loose on the piano, where she found her groove and her voice. Their first recording together, “I Never Loved a Man (the Way I Love You)” was the most guttural and passionate of her recordings to date, and remains a tour de force of soul and personal revelation. “Many of the arrangements were done on the spot, in what we called head sessions,” Aretha recalls in her autobiography, Aretha: From These Roots, “This was worlds away from how I had worked at Columbia, far more spontaneous and free-flowing, with so much more room to be creative…. The enthusiasm and camaraderie in the studio were terrific, like nothing I had experienced at Columbia. This new Aretha music was raw and real, and so much more myself. I loved it!”33 The remainder of the album was recorded in New York with the Muscle Shoals players in tow, a collaboration that set the stage for one of the most important recordings ever made.
If ever there was a game changer for soul music, it was Aretha Franklin’s single “Respect,” which hit the stores on May 6, 1967—just days after the Black Panthers visited the California state capitol bearing arms—and soared to number one on the R&B charts. A driving punch to the rhythm and the urgent forceful blast of a voice from Aretha set a tone of redemption, “What you want! Baby I got it!” the power of which was as stirring as anything in black music ever heard to that point. The lyrics are a forewarning from a working partner to her mate, demanding respect when she comes home. A woman demanding respect from her man was a truly radical salvo across the gender divide at the time. The wicked hooks developed by Aretha and her sister Erma, “R-E-S-P-E-C-T / find out what it means to me,” put a rhythmic stamp on a soul anthem that sounded like a riff from a girls’ jump-rope routine, and it revealed a street savvy that established Aretha as “the Queen of Soul” nearly overnight.
The song burned to number one because it was far more than a dance-inducing cover of a 1965 Otis Redding hit, it was soul and everything anyone ever wanted in soul. It had power—visceral, tangible, physical power—in its sound and an ability to make people act on the ideas in the music. That was Aretha’s pure gift: an ability to take that irresistible umph that churchgoers get and make it secular, righteous, and real.
With urgent lyrics from a woman demanding respect from her man, Aretha opened up an entirely new discourse across the sexual divide. The vast majority of popular relationship songs dealt with emotional truth, fidelity, betrayal, and honor, but rarely professed a confrontational stance toward the male from the female, and never before with the passion, authenticity, and funky groove of Aretha’s rendition. “Respect” was for many a watershed, a revolution in the language of relationships.
Yet “Respect” came to represent far more than a lovers’ spat. Ebony magazine, in an end of the year commentary, described the summer of 1967 as the summer of “ ‘Retha, Rap, and Revolt”; Aretha did her part by providing a soundtrack to the movement at its most dynamic, driven, and desperate. By this time in the movement, Martin Luther King Jr. had abandoned his silence on US foreign policy and had openly opposed the war in Vietnam. The Black Panthers had “stormed” Sacramento, and SNCC leader H. Rap Brown appeared to be “inciting riots” by endorsing the many urban rebellions that summer. These actions left but a tiny minority of appeasing black leaders for the white establishment to negotiate with. The days of accommodation were over. Not everyone agreed with the black political leaders at the time, but anyone could see that “Respect” represented a shift in the center of the black experience once and for all.
Aretha followed that song with “Natural Woman” and “Chain of Fools,” as well as a string of soulful ballads that stirred a collective consciousness in her audience that was both universally appealing and undisputedly black and proud in tone, passion, and soul power. Yet nothing in her later output could match the impact of “Respect,” and Aretha knew it. “It is still my biggest song in concert today,” Aretha expressed in 1999:
So many people identified with and related to “Respect.” It was the need of a nation, the need of the average man and woman in the street, the businessman, the mother, the fireman, the teacher—everyone wanted respect. It was also one of the battle cries of the civil rights movement. The song took on monumental significance. It became the “Respect” women expected from men and men expected from women, the inherent right of all human beings. Three decades later I am unable to give a concert without my fans demanding that same “Respect” from me. “Respect” was—and is—an ongoing blessing in my life.34
Aretha would record five more albums for Atlantic as the 1960s progressed, each finding varying degrees of success but none with the social movement resonance of “Respect.” However, as the 1970s began, Aretha extracted herself from a failed marriage and decided to once again retool her creative focus, steering her sound in a decidedly more self-conscious, spiritual, and African-inspired direction.
Aretha appeared to be busy in 1970 and 1971, recording the brilliant Live at the Fillmore West in San Francisco with guest Ray Charles and releasing a series of singles followed by a greatest hits album. Her fans were continually exposed to Franklin’s music, but she went eighteen months between original album recordings, her longest gap since signing to Atlantic in 1967. During this time she was in the studio, carefully crafting one of her most thoughtful albums. The first song Aretha recorded for her new album in August 1970 was “Young, Gifted and Black,” a remake of a famous Nina Simone song that had made the R&B charts earlier that year.
To Be Young, Gifted and Black was the name of an unfinished play by the New York essayist, activist, and playwright Lorraine Hansberry, whose 1958 play about a working-class Chicago family, A Raisin in the Sun, had been recognized as the first play written by a black woman to have a successful run on Broadway. Hansberry was in fact much more than a playwright. A close confidante of Nina Simone, Hansberry was a political mentor to Simone and helped in the development of Simone’s fiery social consciousness.
While Lorraine was a girlfriend … we never talked about men or clothes or inconsequential things when we got together. It was always Marx, Lenin and revolution—real girls’ talk…. Lorraine was definitely an intellectual, and saw civil rights as only one part of the wider racial and class struggle….
Lorraine started off my political education, and through her I started thinking about myself as a black person in a country run by white people and a woman in a world run by men.35
The impact Lorraine Hansberry had on the black arts of a generation should not be underestimated. Her body of creative works and fiercely held beliefs about radical social change were seen as an inspiration across a broad spectrum of society. Nina Simone was one of her closest followers, and was the most deeply affected. “Before she died Lorraine had been working on a new play, To Be Young, Gifted and Black. I took the title and wrote a song around it in memory of Lorraine, and of so many others.”36
To be Young, Gifted and black
Oh what a lovely precious dream.
To be Young, Gifted and black
Open your heart to what I mean.
Aretha Franklin chose to remake the Simone classic and give her 1971 album the same name. Aretha’s version of the song was structured in a way very similar to Simone’s, beginning with the slow, deliberate pace of a traditional spiritual, and then rising to triumphant highs, punctuated with dramatic stops and starts. Aretha’s version of the song soars over the highs and lands in a crescendo of church choir celebration. For Aretha Franklin to reference Nina Simone, and by extension Simone’s music (and Hansberry’s vision), Aretha deftly acknowledged her respect for the black freedom movement and solidified her lofty pop icon status at the same time. The resultant album was one of her most musically, thematically diverse, as well as one of her most successful, winning a Grammy Award (her seventh to that point). Franklin also wrote her funkiest song, “Rock Steady,” for the album with the help of Donny Hathaway on the wickedly swinging organ. Aretha performed “Rock Steady” on national television on the Flip Wilson Show in 1971 and appeared wearing an African-inspired dress and an Afro, with her backup singers in similar looks.
Aretha was feeling inspired in part because of her new boyfriend, Ken “Wolf” Cunningham, who at the time was developing an African and African-inspired clothing line. In a sense, the two convergent themes of soul music—personal expression and social consciousness—were woven together in 1970 and 1971 as Aretha, the “Natural Woman” and Queen of Soul herself, redefined herself as an African American woman. Aretha Franklin’s personal rediscovery was not uncommon at the time. As she explained:
Well I believe that the black revolution certainly forced me and the majority of black people to begin taking a second look at ourselves. It wasn’t that we were all that ashamed of ourselves, we merely started appreciating our natural selves, … you know, falling in love with ourselves just as we are. We found that we had far more to be proud of. So I suppose the revolution influenced me a great deal, but I must say that mine was a very personal evolution—an evolution of the me in myself. But then I suppose that the whole meaning of the revolution is very much tied up with that sort of thing, so it certainly must have helped what I was trying to do for myself. I know I’ve improved my overall look and sound, they’re much better. And I’ve gained a great deal of confidence in myself.37
At this point in her life Aretha was not simply talking in generalities about trends and styles. She caused a stir with her support of the black revolutionary Angela Davis. In late 1970 the imprisonment of Davis was national news. Aretha Franklin announced that she was willing to pay the entirety of Davis’s bail money to free her.
Angela Davis must go free. Black people will be free. I’ve been locked up (for disturbing the peace in Detroit) and I know you got to disturb the peace when you can’t get no peace. Jail is hell to be in. I’m going to see her free if there is any justice in our courts, not because I believe in Communism, but because she is a Black woman and she wants freedom for black people. I have the money; I got it from black people—they’ve made me financially able to have it—and I want to use it in ways that will help our people.38
Aretha Franklin’s stance in support of Angela Davis was rich in symbolism. (She was out of the country when bail was offered and Davis’s attorneys had to use other means, but the offer was genuine.) Her activist awakening reflected the possibilities of mass participation in a movement that has reached the mainstream. Did Aretha become a militant communist revolutionary? No. But she did come closer to an understanding of herself as a complete person—something far more difficult to do in today’s climate.
With her newfound confidence, Aretha made yet another move toward independence, recording and releasing a true gospel album. This was one of the boldest moves of her career, as she pulled together all of her resources to produce a live recording in Los Angeles with the Reverend James Cleveland’s choir. The high-profile project was a gamble. If it were to fail, it would have set back her career and made it even more difficult for black artists to branch out to secular music and return to their spiritual home. One of the conflicts encountered by church singers branching out into the secular arena was a strong sentiment that one could never go back to the church.
The record, Amazing Grace, was an emotional and spiritual tour de force. The Friday night recording session had the energy of a Sunday sermon, and the kinetic spirit was sparked by the soaring voice, as well as the vision and leadership, of the woman in control of the operation. With Amazing Grace, Aretha brought soul home to its very roots, full circle. Perhaps her proudest moment as an entertainer, the record sold millions. On the Amazing Grace album cover, Aretha is posed in African garb, regal in her complete, natural self.
After Amazing Grace, Aretha Franklin appeared to take a break from directing her work and returned to a series of fairly standard productions, almost as if, like Sly Stone, there was little else to be said in as inspired a fashion as she had before. Jazz arranger Quincy Jones produced her next album, Hey Now Hey (The Other Side of the Sky). The luxurious feel of Jones’s arrangements recalled Aretha’s earlier work at Columbia rather than her ubiquitous raw soul. Lacking the larger vision of Aretha’s two previous album efforts, the album was the first in a string of relative commercial disappointments released through the remainder of the decade. Nevertheless, the gold standard of soul was embodied in Aretha, and the black revolution was integral to her emergence.
The idea of soul music and the soul aesthetic—the notion that black culture, black pride, and black enterprise could and should be working together—reached a zenith during this time, 1970 to 1971 (coincidentally, the time the Lumpen were in operation). For some, this was a revolutionary breakthrough of black progress. For others it was not so simple. Lumpen member Michael Torrence appreciated what Aretha Franklin was doing, up to a point:
She was one of my favorites as far as being a soul singer and the type of music she was making at that time, growing up with it. When she did the Young, Gifted and Black, on one hand we kind of felt like, “OK, about time.” At the same time, we recognized that we in the Party had moved past the cultural nationalism thing. We heard the message that black is beautiful, which it was all right, but politically speaking we had kind of moved past that. So to that extent, it didn’t change how I felt about her as an artist, but it didn’t particularly impress me. It seemed more like, “OK, that’s the thing to do now, that’s the current thing, everybody’s getting on board with it”—but they’re a little bit behind where we were in terms of the politics of it. The revolutionary politics.
We were very hard-line about that stuff. So we took it for what it was. We looked at it as more of a commercial thing. In terms of her as a singer she was one of the greatest, she is the greatest, she is the Queen of Soul. Later I come to find out, later on, that she was involved in a lot more things than I thought she was at that time.39
Though he was a singer himself, for Michael Torrence and the Black Panther Party, the revolution required something stronger than songs to make change. The Panthers were about action.
The mainstream of black America was negotiating these issues on a daily basis and had to contend with assimilation-oriented celebrities such as O. J. Simpson on one hand, and militants such as Eldridge Cleaver on the other. This situation led to a funky mix of popular culture contrasts. But there was one group of black celebrities that could straddle the boundaries between soul power and selling out: the black radio personalities.
A crucial voice in the rise and dissemination of black consciousness during the movement came from the DJs, the radio hosts on black-music-oriented stations. These media savvy men and women captured the explosion of black consciousness on a daily basis during their playful banter between songs and their community announcements, which frequently included protest activities as well as cultural events. The DJ was in the homes of all black Americans and for many was the center of black life. Every major city had at least one black radio station and a stylish, hip, sassy, flashy DJ or two to represent their audience. Many of these DJs took the explosion of black radicalism in stride, and their recognition of the pulse of the people was instrumental in popularizing the black power movement overall, especially in urban areas. Detroit’s Martha Jean “the Queen” Steinberg explains what the purpose of radio personalities was in the 1960s:
We talked like the African drummers used to talk years ago. We talked in a code—”Yes mammy o Daddy, get on down!” We talked about what to do, but some people didn’t know what we were talking about…. We were the cause of the civil rights movement … after it started moving about the nation we let everybody know what was going on, because no one would interview Martin Luther King. No one knew Jesse Jackson. Nobody interviewed these preachers, so we did that ourselves.40
Martin Luther King Jr. was well aware of the role of black DJs in the community, and he made specific efforts to cultivate their support as he engaged in civil disobedience around the country. The offices of radio station WERD in Atlanta were directly above King’s SCLC headquarters, and he could prepare the radio station for an upcoming announcement through a thump on the ceiling.
In some cases, black radio became black power radio. The militant NAACP leader Robert F. Williams became one of the first and most outspoken movement radio hosts. The Monroe, Louisiana, civil rights leader had developed a black armed guard to police the black neighborhoods in defense against rampant KKK attacks. Williams’s principled and public use of guns prompted the NAACP to remove him from leadership. After a chaotic episode in which a white couple inadvertently found themselves in Williams’s home needing protection—Williams aided the couple—Williams was charged with kidnapping and fled the country. In Cuba, Williams wrote the book Negroes With Guns and, with the aid of Fidel Castro, began a weekly broadcast, Radio Free Dixie, that combined a “voice of agitation and prophesy” with a mix of jazz, blues, gospel, soul, and protest songs. Radio Free Dixie could be heard throughout the South and the Eastern Seaboard on Friday nights, setting a standard of what black power radio could accomplish.
In Los Angeles in 1964, the KGFJ DJ Nathaniel “Magnificent” Montague had developed his own signature radio catchphrase, chanting “Burn, baby, burn” whenever a hot song or entertaining banter took place on the air. When Watts exploded in the summer of 1965, the chant was already in use, and the mainstream press conveniently blamed Montague’s chant for the melee instead of the conditions facing black Angelenos. Montague continued to use the chant during the days of turmoil, generating a response from his management to desist. At first he refused because, he says, he understood his audience:
Nobody else was giving them a voice—not the NAACP, not the preachers, not my station’s other deejays. But just like a song, you have to give ‘em a refrain to make ‘em accept it, because they won’t do anything they don’t want to do. The Negro church was telling them it was wrong to burn. I wouldn’t do that. I knew what they were feeling. I knew they felt weak, and I knew the rioting made them feel powerful for once in their lives—that’s why, again, we call it a rebellion, not against a certain policy or a particular law, but against weakness. Maybe they didn’t know what they wanted. Maybe they only knew what they didn’t want, what they would not stand for. It was a start.41
After days of resistance and a weekend to cool down, Montague relented and began using the phrase “Have mercy, Los Angeles” as a means of healing the city. A multifaceted collector of black history and a music producer, Montague recorded his own music, wrote black-conscious poems, and designed black-oriented curricula for public schools years ahead of the move to create black studies programs. To say that the singularly popular Montague was in tune with the black power movement may have been an understatement.
In Chicago a stream of stylized DJs such as “Lucky” Cordell, Bruce Brown, Purvis Spann, and Herb Kent “the Cool Gent” ruled the airwaves at WVON. Kent and Spann were civil rights activists as well as on-air personalities, and they would provide appropriate commentary for their audiences when events would take place and often broadcast at civil rights events. The programmers at WVON were instrumental in supporting Jesse Jackson’s work on Operation Breadbasket and a number of other local causes. It was a time in black America when the local news was as important as the local music, and the soulful black newscaster was part of the cultural milieu. A fledgling news reporter named Don Cornelius emerged from WVON with a vision to capture black music and dance on his own daily television program, Soul Train. Soul Train would emerge from the cultural matrix of Chicago soul and become a weekly syndicated program out of Los Angeles that defined black cultural identity for decades.
In New York, the popular WLIB DJ Gary Byrd developed his own brand of black-conscious style and moved from hip banter to making his own music. Byrd recorded a series of R&B music sides that included “If the People Only Knew (the Power of the People)” and “To You Beautiful Black Sister.” Byrd’s single “Are You Really Ready for Black Power” was a compelling homage to blacks in the movement and a challenge to the average black person:
Are your really ready for black power?
Have you thought about where you’re at?
Are your really ready for black power?
And are you sure your mind is black?
In the modern context, explicitly race-conscious music is hard to find. But at the time Byrd was recording these soul sides, James Brown had established a new tradition of truth-telling in popular music. DJs were playing “Say It Loud—I’m Black and I’m Proud,” which reached number one on the R&B charts. In that sense, Byrd’s works were direct offshoots of Brown’s smash hit single. Gary Byrd’s vision, like that of many of the hip, flashy, sassy, black-conscious radio personalities of the day, was tuned directly into the mood of the streets of black America. These DJs offered their audiences a unique combination of universal appeal and race consciousness.
Since the mid-1950s a number of these prolific black DJs had organized into an association, later named the National Association of Television and Radio Announcers (NATRA), led by Jack Gibson, Tommy Smalls, and a dozen other black media pioneers. The group initially met to socialize with industry executives, to secure distribution of product, and to keep business connections intact. However, there was always an understanding that the forum provided a means of addressing grievances for the members with their predominantly white music industry counterparts. As the group’s conventions grew larger in the 1960s, the voices of dissent became louder. At the 1968 convention, held in Miami only months after the murder of Martin Luther King Jr., an air of hostility took over the event and incidents of violence and intimidation were commonplace. As William Barlow explains, “White record executives, such as Atlantic’s Jerry Wexler, and Phil Walden, Otis Redding’s manager, were threatened with violence by roving bands of unidentified ‘militants’ unless they paid ‘reparations’ on the spot. New Orleans record producer Marshall Sehorn and others were actually beaten up when they refused to pay.”42 Needless to say, this chaotic event put an end to the effectiveness of NATRA, but a statement had been made: the plantation mentality of the R&B industry would not be tolerated any longer.
Washington, DC, DJ Del Shields is adamant about the impact that black radio DJs had in general, and he believes the beginning of the end of their influence came when Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered and black radio hosts remained on the air through the night to communicate with their people: “All across the country, the black disc jockey went to the microphone and talked to his people…. It was black radio that doused the incendiary flames across America. We curtailed the riots. Had we not been on, and told the people, don’t burn baby, and all of that, it would have been much worse. And somebody sat up and said, ‘whoa this is too much. This is too much power. We can’t let them have it.’ “ Shields remains convinced that the demise of the stylish, well-connected black radio DJ was deliberate. “Somebody detected that this was too much power, it had to be broken up. So one of the ways to break it up was … to get rid of personality radio…. Take away the personality of radio and develop it into a ‘format’ and you’ve got the garbage that you have today.”43
Through the first half of the 1970s, soul music enjoyed a zenith of popularity and relevance in terms of the depth and breadth of the music recorded and the credibility and talents of the artists delivering the music. Striking fusions of social statements, love philosophy, and grooving rhythms could be heard from the O’Jays (“For the Love of Money”), Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes (“Bad Luck”), the Main Ingredient (“Everybody Plays the Fool”), Gladys Knight and the Pips (“Neither One of Us”), the Four Tops (“Keeper of the Castle”), the Isley Brothers, and the standard bearers, Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye. Yet gradually, and perhaps directly, as the black freedom movement waned, black freedom music faded from popularity.
What happened to soul? A case can be made that soul music survived as long as there was a movement in place to give the music social meaning. Soul music, music from the soul, necessarily involves an emotional involvement in the subject matter. If one produced a love song, one must infuse that song with an element of love from their own soul to give the experience authenticity. In the case of a vibrant social movement, the emotional involvement transcends the personal relationship and reaches out toward a larger set of relationships. Thus, “Respect” and “People Get Ready” are songs that denote a larger love, a love of humanity and of people in motion toward something greater. The requirements of soul music during the black revolution were more deeply ingrained and required a deeper sense of group solidarity and identification. This identification was expressed not only through lyrics but also in the tone, the tension, and the sense of assertiveness and urgency in the delivery.
As the 1970s progressed, there was a marked decline in nationally recognized black activism. At best, one can say that social movement activism was accomplished on a localized basis. There were fervent hot spots of racial confrontation, such as the forced school busing drama in Boston and the stark racially charged local elections in cities such as Atlanta (which elected its first black mayor, Maynard Jackson Jr., in 1973) and Chicago (which elected its first black mayor, Harold Washington, in 1983). In many cities the African American population underwent social changes not reported on the nightly news. The 1968 Fair Housing Act (passed during the crises following the murder of Martin Luther King Jr.) eliminated one of the barriers to black homeownership outside of traditional black communities and allowed for an exodus of black homeowners leaving (escaping?) the ghettos for safer (whiter?) neighborhoods. Meanwhile, the mean streets of black America became meaner, as many impoverished communities were inundated with illicit drugs, and a sense of bewilderment, confusion, and depression overtook many people, including thousands of traumatized Vietnam veterans. The rise of a black middle class was contrasted with the entrenchment of a dispossessed black underclass that no longer had even the millenarian mythos of Martin Luther King’s “we shall overcome” to work with. It is in this cultural vacuum that hip-hop emerged as a voice from, and a voice for, the invisible urban underclass.
In the early 1970s, a great many soul songs anticipated a new world of freedom in their message and their moods. Songs like “Move on Up” by Curtis Mayfield, “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free” by Nina Simone, and “Someday We’ll All Be Free” by Donny Hathaway reflected this implicit sense of hope and possibility. As the 1970s passed into the 1980s, the hope for a promising future in black America and in black popular music was replaced by a yearning for the better times from “back in the day.” A verse from Rick James’s 1981 song “Ghetto Life” perhaps best represents the end of those freedom dreams:
One thing about the ghetto
you don’t have to hurry
it’ll be there tomorrow
so brother don’t you worry.
By 1975 the last of the great movement songs (“Fight the Power” by the Isley Brothers and “Wake Up Everybody” by Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes) were released, yet it might be said that the movement had died years before. It was the premise and the purpose of soul music to represent the unity of purpose in the black experience, even when that unity was rapidly dissolving.
At its height, soul music was the living pulse of the black community, the conscience of the movement, and a daily inspiration to keep on pushing. When Curtis Mayfield wrote “People Get Ready” in 1965, he was tapping into a collective sense of anticipation of an oncoming social transformation. This is when soul was at its best.
Five years later, those ideas of change had metastasized into something far more confrontational and ominous. When the Lumpen performed the radicalized version of “People Get Ready” in 1970, they were tapping into these palpable energies that were anticipating radical change. They took the optimistic aesthetic of soul and extended its message to the militant extreme.
The Lumpen had crafted a brand of militant soul music, and if that seemed outrageous, theirs was but another domino dropping in the series of revolutionary social changes taking place all around them. Their work was kindling to help inflame the revolution of the mind taking place within the souls of black folk in this watershed moment.