The Lumpen at this point “own” their audience. Any solid rhythm and blues act worth its salt would, after five songs, now have the crowd in the palms of their hands. This is when they can play their most iconoclastic music—songs that may require the devotion and patience of the listener. It is at this point that the Lumpen perform their version of “Ol’ Man River,” a widely popular American standard recently reprised by the Temptations.
The Lumpen start with their familiar political chants, and by this time the audience is fervent it its response:
All Power to the People! / All Power to the People!
All Power to the People! / All Power to the People!
Free Bobby! / Free Bobby!
Free Ericka! / Free Ericka!
Death to the fascist Pigs! / Death to the fascist Pigs!
All right …
William Calhoun introduces the song with another dialogue and another reference to the Temptations, letting the audience know that the version the Lumpen is about to play is in reference to the Temptations’ rendition of the song, which was well known to R&B fans at the time.
Once again we’d like to get into the Temptations our way.
We’re gonna feature Clark Bailey once again on vocals.
It’s a little thing, goes like this.
The band plays a very slow, rolling melody, and the tone of a traditional hymn fills the room. It is familiar yet unfamiliar, and probably not expected at a revolutionary gathering like this one. A soft, low voice produces the opening, followed by the gentlest of harmonies sung collectively by the group:
(Voice 1) Here we all suffer / in the hands of fascists
(Baritone voice 2) Here we are pained / while the rich pig plays
(Voice 1) Getting no rest / from the dawn til the sunset
(Voice 2) Getting no rest / until freedom day
There is something oddly familiar about the softly sung notes, and the rich contradiction is only beginning to emerge on the audience. If there is one hit by the Temptations that represents the best and worst of Motown records for many, it is the Temps’ rendition of “Ol’ Man River.” The original was much more than a slow ballad with a melancholy theme of endurance and toil. It was a controversial showcase of “the plight of the Negro” in America. “Ol’ Man River” was a popular show tune throughout the mid-twentieth century and had been performed and recorded by artists such as Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Ray Charles, Sam Cooke, Judy Garland, and even Aretha Franklin. The towering harmonies and heartfelt tones of the song had resonated across generations. The Lumpen’s artistic foils, the Temptations, had recorded a live version of the song on October 3, 1966, at Roostertail’s Upper Deck in Detroit that appeared on the 1967 album Temptations Live! The song was included on a later compilation, The Temptations in a Mellow Mood, in 1968, which was their best-selling album to that point. Motown Records founder Berry Gordy Jr. was adamant during the early years of the record label that his acts perform the most sugarcoated pop standards in an effort to gain a larger audience. It was one of many contradictions surrounding the group and label that was nevertheless so successful.1
The Lumpen seize upon this contradiction and make their audience aware of it. For their 1970 performance in Oakland, the Lumpen structure their rendition of “Ol’ Pig Nixon” with precisely the same stanzas and cadences as the Temptations’ version. The audience is primed to recognize and follow the song note for note. Yet the message, three years after the Temptations recording, is altogether different:
(Forcefully sung chorus) They chained us up they shot us down!
They spread our blood all through the ground!
(Spoken) Well lift that gun and show no fear
(Sung very slowly) We’ll shoot those pigs until they’re dead
The audience at the Lumpen performance screams with delight at this verse as the richly sung harmonies—so reminiscent of sadness and submission—are sung with a spirit of defiance and militancy. It should be noted that the song “Ol’ Man River” has a controversial history of its own that many music fans are likely aware of, and the sheer delight of the audience upon hearing the melodies of that song can be in the catharsis of witnessing that composition spun on its head. No one has heard the tones or the texts of this pop standard expressed in this manner.
(Sung slowly in the high range) Never be free while Agnew breathes
Lift up our guns / to end this madness
Lift up our guns / and run the pigs along
(Sung in the low range) Ol’ Pig Nixon, that ol’ Pig Nixon
He don’t know nothing / We all should do something
For ol’ pig Nixon / He just keeps on oinking along
At this point in the Lumpen performance, the audience appears hysterical with delight, as the traditional song has been skewered and President Richard Nixon has been revealed as the source of the song’s derisive subject matter. By the time the Lumpen reach the extended notes of the final verse, hoots can be heard from the audience as the crowd appears to be consumed by the rich rendering of the vision and the quality of the music.
For ol’ pig Nixon, he just keeps oinking
Ol’ pig Nixon, he just keeps oinking
Ol’ Pig Nixon, he won’t be oinking too lonnng!
A crescendo of applause follows the final line of the song, along with the enthusiastic Panther Party chants.
All Power to the People!
(Audience) All Power to the People!
All Power to the People!
All Power to the People!2
For the Lumpen to appropriate a traditional song in their revolutionary performance speaks volumes about their approach to their work as musicians as well as black revolutionaries. The many representations of “Ol’ Man River” resonate with controversies that date back to the original performances of the song in the 1920s. This chapter will explore the relationship between black musical traditions and social change, and in particular the music recorded in the revolutionary moment of the Lumpen’s existence.
The radical rendition of “Ol’ Man River” performed by the Lumpen in 1970 was a timely revision to an American standard, although the song itself has been anything but static over the years. The song had survived for generations as a show tune and pop standard, and the Lumpen were certainly not the first to remake the traditional song on their own terms. The lyrics to “Ol’ Man River” were originally written by the American songwriter Oscar Hammerstein II for the 1927 Broadway stage musical Show Boat. Hammerstein is recognized as one of America’s great lyricists, with a number of famous compositions (“Oklahoma,” “Some Enchanted Evening”) that have become firmly established in the American narrative. The melancholy and dramatic music was written by the noted American theater composer Jerome Kern, who collaborated with Hammerstein on the score for the musical. The meticulously arranged score has remained eminently recognizable over the years. However, the lyrics to “Ol’ Man River” have taken as many turns as the Mississippi.
Show Boat was a massive, groundbreaking Broadway stage show utilizing 160 performers and grand stage props. The production is often credited as a turning point in American theater, in which the story and the songs were thematically woven together, as in an opera, but the music was of contemporary form. Based on a 1926 novel by Edna Ferber, the story revolves around a traveling musical troupe on the Mississippi River in the postbellum South. The initial stage production of the musical showcased its own liberal sympathies for the suffering of Negroes at the time. The story tells two interwoven narratives, that of the entertainers on the show boat and that of the tribulations of the black service workers.
The experience of Show Boat was a striking one. As the production begins, a festive tone surrounds the primary characters as their relationships and potential conflicts are established in the first act. As the second-act curtain rises, a burly black tenor (frequently played by Paul Robeson in the original run) sings “Ol’ Man River” to typically stunned audiences. One critic described the show as “an overwhelming feast of spectacle, melody and drama.” Because of Robeson’s impact, the musical was extremely popular and ran for three years until the stock market crash of 1929.3
“Ol’ Man River” was written to be a lament of slavery and the suffering of blacks who lived and worked near the Mississippi river. The original opening lines to the song, intended to be delivered slowly as the curtain rose on act two were: “Niggers all work on de Mississippi / Niggers all work while de white folks play …” Hammerstein II insists that he deliberately chose those lyrics to emphasize the degradation inflicted upon blacks at the time.
The harsh lyrics drew immediate controversy, which increased as the popularity of the song “Ol’ Man River” transcended the stage show. The song’s abject sadness and emotional depth—so well represented throughout the song—contributed to the controversy. From its earliest inception, there were two starkly divergent opinions regarding the lyrics. The white authors and stage show producers generally supported the use of the phrase “Niggers all work” in the song as a dramatic device, while the black cast members understandably resisted the use of the demeaning slur, despite the realism it was purported to convey.
Oscar Hammerstein’s son William directed and produced Show Boat over the years and frequently encountered resistance from the blacks in his cast:
Every time I’ve staged the show, I’ve had a talk with the cast; they all agree, but eventually they come to me separately and say, “I can’t sing that.” “Colored folks” was brought in in 1946 when I was the stage manager. “Here we all work” is Paul Robeson’s awkward addition. My father hated it, and I hate it.4
As a result of the controversy, the lyrics were frequently revised to represent the established racial and cultural norms of the time. In the 1936 film version of Show Boat (which Hammerstein II supervised), the lyrics were revised to: “Darkies all work on de Mississippi / Darkies all work while de white folks play.” When the musical was revived in 1946, the opening lines were changed again to: “Colored folks work on de Mississippi.” Later in 1946 a film biography of the “Ol’ Man River” songwriter, Jerome Kern, was produced, and the opening lines were revised once again, to the point where the meaning—and certainly the graphic reality—was obscured: “Here we all work ‘long the Mississippi / Here we all work while the white folk play.”5
This “cleaner,” less racially charged opening stanza has become for all intents and purposes the standard version of the song, popularized on recordings by Frank Sinatra, Ray Charles, and Sammy Davis Jr., among others. The verses would alternate from striking shouts—”Don’t look up / An’ don’t look down / You don’ dast make / De white boss frown!”—to solemn singing moans—”Dat ol’ man river / He mus’ know sumpin’ / But don’t say nuthin’ / He jes’ keeps rollin’ / He keeps on rollin’ along.” One aspect of the durability of the song is that it had an ability to convey an awareness of racial injustice to a predominantly white audience, both through the lyrics and through the music itself. This occurred in part because the popular song had the tonality of a black religious song, or spiritual. The song also invoked a well-established trope in black cultural memory, that of using the river as a passage onward and as a passage to freedom from bondage.
A series of significant revisions of the song were popularized by the indomitable African American artist and activist Paul Robeson. Robeson was a towering figure of American popular culture and a leader of a mid-twentieth-century black renaissance. Robeson’s presence on the American popular cultural scene in the 1930s and 1940s cut a new path for the black activist-artist at the time. Born in 1898 in Princeton, New Jersey, Robeson’s father was a Methodist minister who had been born a slave. His mother died from a stove fire accident when he was six, yet Robeson pushed on; he went to Rutgers as an athlete, where he lettered in four sports, and earned a Columbia Law School degree. He then entered the theater and became famous in the mid-1920s for his dignified lead roles (for the time) in plays and subsequent films such as The Emperor Jones and Othello. Robeson was also a hugely popular singer who would perform spirituals, traditional folk songs, and later union songs and political protest songs with his thunderous baritone voice.
As Robeson toured the world from the mid-1920s through the 1940s, he studied the languages and folk songs of local people and would sing their songs in their own languages. Said to be fluent in twenty-five languages, his primary affiliation was with the working-class people he met on his journeys. Robeson spoke with admiration for the humanity he experienced while overseas and his affection for the working-class-oriented culture of the Soviet Union. The USSR was of particular interest to Robeson and, in subsequent years, to the US government. As he once stated: “I have spoken many times about my first trip to the Soviet Union in 1934. For the first time as I stepped on Soviet soil, I felt myself a full human being, a full human being.”6
Robeson determined that the suffering of people in the working classes worldwide was no different from those in the United States, and that if the workers in the United States could transcend their racial divide, they could organize against the ruling classes. Robeson also realized that his ability to entertain could be used as political leverage in the causes he espoused. This was perhaps his greatest threat. He realized that the ability to convey messages through the singing voice had a potentially deeper impact than merely speaking for a cause.
In 1936 Robeson performed and sang “Ol’ Man River” in the film version of Show Boat, and he remained true to the standardized lyrics for the play and the film. The film version afforded Robeson another level of worldwide popularity. However, when he performed the song in concert, which was a fan favorite, he rearranged many of the lyrics to give the black subject more agency. Robeson revised the original standardized lines: “Dere’s an ol’ man called de Mississippi / Dat’s de ol’ man dat I’d like to be” and replaced them with the lyrics: “There’s an ol’ man called the Mississippi / That’s the ol’ man I don’t like to be.” Similarly, a later verse—”Git a little drunk, an’ you land in jail”—was changed to—”You show a little grit and you lands in jail.” Robeson’s revisions of the final verses of the song are perhaps Robeson’s crowning blow to the steeped misery of the song:
But I keeps laffin’ instead of cryin’
I must keep fightin’
Until I’m dyin’
And Ol’ Man River
He just keeps rollin’ along!7
Robeson was a triumphant artist, orator, and leader of people during the decades of the between war years (mid-1920s to early 1940s). He was by far the most significant African American known to the world at the time. Robeson’s physical stature, highly educated demeanor, and personal charisma made him a natural-born leader. However, when his working-class politics began to clash with American foreign policy, his demise would become a national spectacle. In 1947 Robeson was charged with being a communist and was called to testify before Congress. Robeson refused to cower to the inquisition and claimed his own artistic and political independence. During testimony, he claimed that he was “violently antifascist” and that if he was antifascist overseas, then he “should be allowed to be antifascist in the U.S.”8
Robeson made another principled leap, perhaps even more courageous, to become and to remain a political artist. He used his ability to entertain, enrapture, and envelop an audience for political and social purposes. In 1947 Robeson “retired” from the stage with the following proclamation:
I am today, giving up my concerts for two or three years, to enter into this struggle, for what I call getting into the rank and file of my people, for full citizenship in these United States. So I won’t be singing, except for the rights of my people, for the next couple of years. No pretty songs, no pretty songs.9
On his own, Robeson had advanced ideas later propagated by black radical theorists such as Harold Cruse, Amilcar Cabral, and Frantz Fanon, that a revolutionary culture is part and parcel of revolutionary change. As Harold Cruse wrote in 1967, “No social movement of a protest nature … can be successful or have any positive meaning unless it is at one and the same time a political, economic and cultural movement.”10
The friction Robeson received as a result of his interpretation of “Ol’ Man River” was minor compared to the crushing career blows that came as a result of his public sympathies with the Soviet Union at the time. During a 1949 speech in Paris in which Robeson expounded upon the folly of war and the role of American blacks in it, his words were reconfigured to imply that he wanted black Americans to defy the US government and refuse to fight against the USSR should a conflict arise. As nebulous as the claim was, the entire weight of the American popular culture apparatus was targeted on Robeson. Shortly after Robeson’s Paris comments, the popular black baseball star Jackie Robinson was summoned to speak to Congress and publicly denounced Robeson’s (misrepresented) claims and, by extension, Robeson. Robeson refused to publicly criticize Robinson, claiming “it is just what they want us to do.”11
The resultant chilling effect on the activism of black entertainers from that point was devastating. Robeson was the most prominent black celebrity of his era, and certainly the most prominent celebrity of his time to attempt to bring about social change through his status as an entertainer. Robeson stood by his beliefs and defiantly claimed his right to speak and to sing out in the ways he felt were consistent with those beliefs.
In 1950 the United States entered into a military conflict in Korea. As part of the anticommunist hysteria of the times, the US government revoked Robeson’s passport, and many of his associates within the entertainment industry blacklisted him, preventing him from performing in the United States. Aside from a series of concerts sung at the Canadian border to listeners in Canada in the early 1950s, Robeson was effectively silenced for nearly a decade. Nevertheless, his principles and his understanding of the significance of the cultural front in social change were indisputable. When Robeson died in 1976, his tombstone read: “The artist must first elect to fight for Freedom or for Slavery. I have made my choice. I had no alternative.”12
Paul Robeson represented the most accomplished example of the activist-artist that the African American community had produced in the twentieth century. His uncompromising stance, however, served to accelerate his isolation from his peers and his personal downfall into depression and despair. The most significant end result of the Robeson experience for African American artists, however, was the strong and stark division fostered between the entertainer and the activist. After Robeson, it was clear that the American public (and members of the African American population desperate to enter the mainstream) would only accept its blacks as one or the other. Therefore, activists such as Martin Luther King Jr. and entertainers such as Sammy Davis Jr. got the harsh message that they should remain politely outside of each other’s view.
The pressure was severe on black entertainers during the 1950s. They saw themselves as embarking on their initial steps into the American cultural mainstream, and the colossal scorn and scrutiny heaped upon Robeson left no room at all for expression of the slightest alliances. Robeson’s grand overture to revitalize “Ol’ Man River” was quietly ignored by his contemporaries. Artists such as Sammy Davis Jr., Duke Ellington, Sam Cooke, Ray Charles, Judy Garland, and Frank Sinatra all recorded “Ol’ Man River” and did not venture out of the “accepted” lyrical range of the song. One might expect an African American artist to show solidarity with Robeson at some point and use his version of the lyrics. The absence of this symbolic support is telling. The Lumpen may have been the first African American singers to dramatically alter the lyrics of the song in any way since Robeson, and certainly the first to repoliticize it.
Black entertainers during the WWII period were focused on eking out a living in a steadfastly racist and segregated industry within a racist and segregated society. In this respect, black entertainers were engaging with Jim Crow almost every night, frequently as the only blacks their white audiences would ever come to know, often facing up to stereotypes of the foulest nature, and nightly inducing the emotionalism of their own musical traditions to engage with, and salve the guilty hearts of, their white patrons. For a great many black entertainers, from big band performers such as Count Basie and Duke Ellington to singers such as Lena Horne and Billie Holiday, it was a bittersweet road to a stilted version of stardom in white America.
One song during the pre-World War II period that resonated directly with a message of injustice for African Americans was “Strange Fruit,” recorded by Billie Holiday in 1939. No popular song from a black entertainer contained such stark references to the suffering of blacks at the time.
Southern trees bear strange fruit
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root
Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.
Sung slowly and methodically, the song seems to embody the terror and despair felt by the victims of the thousands of lynchings—those racist mob murders that occurred with such brazen regularity in the South. The “black bodies swinging” are no longer dancing the jitterbug or lindy hop, they are corpses, physical examples of the raw race hate unleashed by whites upon blacks in this country. This was Billie Holiday’s triumph.
“Lady Day” was born Eleanora Fagan in Philadelphia in 1915 and had endured rape, neglect, and a life of prostitution by her teenage years. Her temper was legendary and she could spit tobacco with the best of the sailors who stumbled through the seedy clubs she performed in during the early parts of her career. Yet she transformed her trials into a searing sound of blues that transcended time and place. Billie’s expressive, somber sounds reflected upon the collective blues people regardless of the lyrics to her music. One heard the suffering of her people in anything she played. But “Strange Fruit” would take it to another level.
Like “Ol’ Man River,” “Strange Fruit” was written by a Jewish American who wanted to bring a focus to the injustices afforded blacks. However, where Oscar Hammerstein II was himself an American songwriting institution with a lineage of iconic songs and musicals to his credit, “Strange Fruit” was written by a little-known radical Jewish poet named Abel Meeropol, who went by the pen name of Lewis Allan. Meeropol, who had seen a horrific photo of a lynching in a teachers’ union magazine, was moved to write about the injustice and performed the song in leftist circles in New York City. Barney Josephson, the founder of New York’s self-proclaimed “first integrated nightclub,” Café Society, urged Meeropol to play the song for Billie Holiday, who was playing at the club at the time. (Café Society was often referred to as the first truly integrated nightclub in the United States when it opened in 1938. There were, however, many black-owned nightclubs in major cities before 1938 that did not have racially exclusive codes.)13
Reports differ on just how receptive Holiday initially was to the request to sing a song with such stark lyrics. Holiday claims in her autobiography that she jumped on the idea immediately, while other accounts state that she was more circumspect. Nevertheless, Holiday performed the song in concert regularly until her death in 1959. “Strange Fruit” would become her definitive recording due to her ability to convey the horrors of lynching through both lyrical clarity and emotive force. Rarely are the two elements of music so starkly and effectively combined. Unlike “Ol’ Man River,” the essence of “Strange Fruit” was not diluted over the years, and the song has remained as an anthemic clarion call to announce the horrors of black life in America.14
For Holiday, it cemented her status as an icon of black jazz and blues. It also opened up larger questions of the role of popular music in the dissemination of topics involving social justice, particularly from the black music tradition. Most black artists recording at the time were content to produce safe lyrics in their music and typically avoided the direct language of rage, violence, or racial enmity in their works. This does not mean the sentiments were not prevalent. It is interesting to note that both Holiday and Robeson were already established artists with a white audience—and that each recorded music that was designed to shock and challenge their listeners with provocative words, words that an unknown singer would not dare risk a career on. One may argue that established artists not only has the potential to dramatically change their public image, but also possesses an ability to alter the sensibilities of a large audience of listeners. This is one reason why popular protest music has such value as a potential force for social change.
Paul Robeson was not the first prominent artist to utilize popular music for political purposes. From the earliest days of the nation, periods of social upheaval have given rise to protest songs. Labor activists were prolific at creating workers’ anthems out of popular refrains. The Civil War-era patriotic song “Battle Hymn of the Republic” was rearranged by Ralph Chaplin, songwriter for the Industrial Workers of the World, for the workers’ anthem “Solidarity Forever” in 1915. In 1947 John Handcox wrote the song “Roll the Union On” from the foundation of the 1937 gospel song “Roll the Chariot On.”15 To take a gospel song or a patriotic anthem and transform it into rebel music is like taking a snapshot of a moment in time, from past to present, in which an accepted rendition from a previous era is transformed, made new and relevant to the present in a different context, sometimes a dramatically different context.
During the Great Depression and post-World War II period, the modern protest song was commonly associated with the folksingers of the day. Singers such as Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger were consistent authors of protest songs who wrote and performed with a simple voice and guitar accompaniment. Guthrie, a hardscrabble vagabond and prolific writer who lived and wrote amidst the poverty of rural America, is best known for his 1940 composition “This Land Is Your Land,” which was a response to what he saw as the shallow message of the Irving Berlin standard “God Bless America.” Guthrie’s triumph was to reimagine a standardized song and style into something representative of the dispossessed people of his time. This approach survived down the years and found new life in the 1960s amid the youthful, roots-inspired counterculture. Bob Dylan’s stark guitar ballads of the early 1960s kept the traditions of Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger alive and foreshadowed a decade of deep discontent.
The Lumpen were accidental heirs to a tradition, ones who applied a new spirit to musical arrangements, lyrics, performances, rituals, and commemorations that were in the process of being transformed by the social movements of the day. The selections of traditional songs and established popular black music that the Lumpen chose to record, reprise, and parody reveals them to be active agents in the deep tradition of resistance music that centered on the “updating” of popular songs.
The secular party music of African Americans from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries centered around the leisure time performances of vocalist/guitarists, fiddlers, and brass and piano players who played to their working-class audiences with a tone and timbre that was as rough and raucous as their lives were. “The blues” was the central ethos, sound, and style of the black working class, those whom LeRoi Jones called the “blues people.” From rural Delta juke joints to urban jazz and swing clubs, black revelers could hear the rhythms, the moans, and the screams that turned sadness and sorrow into celebration—if only for a night. Angela Y. Davis explains:
The blues idiom requires absolute honesty in the portrayal of black life. It is an idiom that does not recognize taboos: whatever figures into the larger picture of working-class African-American realities—however morally repugnant it may be to the dominant culture or to the black bourgeoisie—is an appropriate subject of blues discourse.16
Under the weight of second-class citizenship, black Americans have consistently used the blues as their own form of resistance music. It spoke to their collective experience, yet was intimately personal. It spoke in humorous puns and twists essentially as a way to laugh to keep from crying. “Blues is the devil’s music and we is his children,” one of the characters in Walter Mosley’s blues novel, RL’s Dream, explains. The blues is both survival and sorrow, life force and death wish, God and the devil’s music rolled all into one collective expression of historical memory. Mosley’s character Soupspoon speaks of his recollection of the value of the blues in the daily life of Delta sharecroppers:
He remembered the cotton field and all the men and women lumbering off to work from the plantation barracks. Hollers and calls came from the fields even before the sun was up. But it was silence he heard at the end of the day.
I’m way past tired to almost dead, [he] would say. But by midnight on Saturday he was dancing full out.
A Negro didn’t own too much back then, but he had the ears to hear music and the hands and mouth to make it. Washboards, wash-tubs, and homemade guitars. Mouth harps from the dime store and songs from deep down in the well….17
All social movements have utilized the celebratory music of the masses and aligned them with the politics of pleasure in order to unify their group members. Many of the lyrics of black music have affected the use of implied meanings and coded messages of resistance. Many spirituals, the songs of hope wailed by slaves, allowed for shrewdly delivered visions of freedom. One such traditional song, “Follow the Drinking Gourd,” in fact veils a reference to the Big Dipper, the star formation that pointed the way north during slavery. “Wade in the Water,” ostensibly a song about baptism, was also used as a call to cross the river to freedom. From the outset of the black experience in America, a dual language of music was employed to allow subversive communication to occur through the established work songs and Christian spirituals that black slaves were allowed to sing. As Stokely Carmichael so aptly put it: “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.”
The spirituals, the blues, jazz, and rhythm and blues have provided means of sustenance and subversion through a complex matrix of call-and-response collective exhortations, of strained and intense yet controlled vocal inflections, of collectively improvised harmonizing, scatting, sing-talking, and outright preaching over a tune. The tone and texture of blues songs, ballads, stompers, and personal laments were all imbued with a collective expression of both sorrow and hope that reflected the collective mood of a people. The songs as a whole were radical by virtue of their defiance of hopelessness, thereby supplying strength to the community through a common understanding.
In the mid-1960s, no sound of black music was more popular than Motown Records. “The Sound of Young America” had taken over the country. The syrupy doo-wop vocalizing of Smokey Robinson, the breathtaking harmonies of the Temptations and the Four Tops, and the glamour spectacle that was Diana Ross and the Supremes established Motown as a symbol of African American success and an element of American folklore almost instantly.
Pop music, Motown, and other elements of soul music in the early and mid-1960s represented the sounds and signposts of a new generation that was looking forward, not back. The breeding ground for a break from the blues tradition was set in place, ironically, by the most mainstream of black popular music institutions.
The rise of Motown Records as a northern soul label with an affinity toward pop melodies and crossover appeal was taken with a degree of irony as well as pride from all quarters. The upwardly mobile ethos of Motown was both a source of pride and polite derision for African Americans of all persuasions, including young musicians in the Bay Area. William Calhoun of the Lumpen has his own theory about the Motown sound and what it was all about:
I wanted to do a book back in the early ‘60s and I wanted to title it “Oh My Lawd They Done Killed the Blues.” It’s really just the story of the emergence of Motown and the Motown sound, because they related to the first generation of black folks that were totally urban and had no connection to the Deep South. So the music, the blues, was over. The Delta blues that had kind of made its migration, and even the more citified blues out of Chicago, the Motown thing was away from that.18
Motown music was, in many ways, revolutionary in that it broke away from the prevailing forms, techniques, and methods of black music making. Beyond just the personal appeal of their youthful and vibrant lead singers, these artists were developing a sound that was indeed removed from the siege mentality and survivalism of the Jim Crow experience.
Certainly, the younger performers such as Little Stevie Wonder and the Jackson 5 would emerge almost entirely detached from the apartheid experience of the South. Stevie Wonder’s astonishing and jubilant performance on the harmonica on his first hit record, “Fingertips Part 2” in 1963, recast the use of that instrument almost overnight. As a well-established tool for propagating the feel of the blues, the rolling, moaning tones of the harmonica had wailed for release from the misery of poverty and Jim Crow for generations. Stevie Wonder brought the sound out of the South and into the sound of young America. The spirited steps and youthful exuberance of the Jackson 5 were uplifting showstoppers when they hit the pop scene in 1969 with four consecutive number-one pop hits. The entire Motown apparatus, which was quite literally organized around the assembly-line approach to music making, steered clear of the blues.
Motown founder Berry Gordy Jr. was a jazz aficionado. He appreciated the jet-setting jazz-influenced high life. He couldn’t and wouldn’t stand for working in the automobile factories. He was, at that time, out of step with working-class Detroit. As Nelson George writes:
Detroit’s favorite performer was not jazz giant Charlie Parker, but John Lee Hooker, a foot-stomping, one beat boogie bluesman from Clarksdale, Mississippi. Hooker shared the same values and background as the older black masses of Detroit. His songs catalogued his life, especially the transition from rural to urban living, and, in doing so, created a verbal portrait of life as seen by Detroit’s black immigrants. And Hooker’s metallic guitar strokes were the perfect stimulant for house parties and gin drinking.
Hooker’s blues, and that of the other urban bluesman, was a crude, vital music that didn’t move Berry the way jazz, or even the smoother sound of Nat “King” Cole or Detroit native Della Reese, did.19
Gordy was also adept at recruiting singers with a touch of polish who didn’t bring “the church” to the session with them. As Gerald Early writes:
The three major early groups of the company—the Supremes, the Temptations, and the Miracles—were put together and rehearsed at their high schools. They were not church groups; in fact, the members did not attend the same church, and in various autobiographies there is little talk about the influence of the black church in their music.20
By creating an operation that utilized talented songwriters, jazz-trained musicians willing to follow directions, and worldly, charismatic personalities to sing the songs, Berry Gordy Jr. created the bourgeois black world he wanted to inhabit. He eventually found a means of creating a music that combined the emotional vitality of the blues yet kept the sound and the style upwardly mobile and accessible to people outside of the blues experience. Black music was changing in subtle and unsubtle ways, and Motown was a bright (white?) beacon of that change.
The breeding ground for a rupture with the blues tradition was set in place by a convergence of crosscurrents of black culture. From the pop idols of the Motown stable to the Black Nationalists in urban battle zones, the idea of moving forward essentially left little space for a celebration of the blues impulse at the moment of revolution. Maulana (Ron) Karenga, writing in 1967, took the revolutionary transition to its logical conclusion and sought to retire the blues. In his essay “Black Cultural Nationalism,” he concludes his discussion with the following:
Art will revive us, inspire us, give us enough courage to face another disappointing day. It must not teach us resignation. For all our art must contribute to revolutionary change and if it does not, it is invalid.
Therefore, we say the blues are invalid; for they teach resignation, in a word acceptance of reality—and we have come to change reality. We will not submit to the resignation of our fathers who lost their money, their women, and their lives and sat around wondering “what did they do to be so black and blue.” …
Perhaps people will object violently to the idea that the blues are invalid, but one should understand that they are not invalid historically. They will always represent a very beautiful, musical and psychological achievement of our people; but today they are not functional because they do not commit us to the struggle of today and tomorrow, but keep us in the past. And whatever we do, we cannot remain in the past, for we have too much at stake in the present. And we find our future much too much rewarding to be rejected.
Let our art remind us of our distaste for the enemy, our love for each other, and our commitment to the revolutionary struggle that will be fought with the rhythmic reality of a permanent revolution.21
To make an outright challenge to such a fundamental aspect of the lived experience of African Americans was a bold move on Karenga’s part. Yet it was reflective of the times in many ways. Karenga saw himself as a leader of a cultural revolution that would change the hearts and minds of black people, who he determined were in search of cultural references that would sustain their revolutionary struggle.
Karenga’s comments were unpopular to members of a generation that was sustained by the blues, those who understood the “infrapolitics” of survival—what Robin D. G. Kelley in Race Rebels calls the “hidden transcripts” of resistance that the blues so eloquently transmitted across generations every Friday and Saturday night at juke joints from Rochester to Waco, and infused the Sunday morning church sermons and songs with resplendent fire and spirit as well.22
Yet Karenga was on to something. On the streets of black America in the mid to late 1960s a new rhythm was emerging, one that resonated along with the “black and proud” stance promoted so effectively by James Brown years before he penned the song that contained the phrase. Many black youth, Black Nationalists, and black revolutionaries in the late 1960s had a visceral experience of being drawn toward the radical new rhythms and led away from the traditional framework for black music. As James Brown and his band began the process of “re-Africanizing” black American music, the cultural isolationism of “the so-called Negro” began to break down. The new black music was changing the cultural landscape of the world. The blues was not a part of the Black Panther Party’s musical repertoire either. A new era, a new time, required a new approach to music making.
It would take a great deal of courage for an established black musical entertainer to break from the norms of the industry and produce direct social commentary in her music during the early 1960s. It would take Nina Simone to break that mold, as she had always done. A trailblazer of her own, a gifted pianist and classically trained performer, her career was marked by fits of outrage and improvisational genius. It would be the events of 1963 that would take Nina Simone over the edge:
The bombing of the little girls in Alabama and the murder of Medgar Evers were like the final pieces of a jigsaw that made no sense until you had fitted the whole thing together. I suddenly realized what it was to be black in America in 1963—it came as a rush of fury, hatred and determination. In church language, the Truth entered into me and I “came through.”
… I had it in my mind to go out and kill someone, I didn’t know who, but someone I could identify as being in the way of my people getting some justice for the first time in three hundred years….
I sat down at my piano. An hour later I came out of my apartment with the sheet music for “Mississippi Goddam” in my hand. It was my first civil rights song, and it erupted out of me quicker than I could write it down. 23
The end result was a blistering rant against Jim Crow segregation, with a twist of dark comedy. During her first performance, Simone announced the song as “a show tune … but the show hasn’t been written for it yet.” With a bouncing melody that might anticipate a lighthearted frolic, Simone pours her anger out like never before:
Picket lines, school boycotts
They try to say it’s a communist plot
All I want is equality
For my sister my brother my people and me!
Simone slices up the contradictions of southern life, and by the end of her rant, Simone’s outrage explodes beyond the use of rhymes
Everybody knows about Mississippi
Everybody knows about Alabama
Everybody knows about Mississippi God-damn!
Prefiguring the protest movement style of the latter part of the decade, Nina Simone, like the Lumpen a few years later, would work from a familiar form—in her case show tunes, in the Lumpen’s case soul music—and turn the purpose and the production on its head.
Like Paul Robeson, Nina Simone’s bold foray into message music was not immediately followed up by her peers. Simone was not imitated in part because she had no peers in the industry, and, once again, African American artists deliberately addressing a social movement in direct language risked their entire careers. It typically required an artist at the top of his or her craft to make such an attempt and not be wiped from the scene.
Sam Cooke was one of the few artists in the position of Nina Simone, with a massive white and black following in the early 1960s. Cooke, despite his smooth persona and lighthearted pop music fare, was a radical activist-artist in his own right. Cooke sought to organize black musicians into their own union, similar to the white-run unions that regularly kept black musicians out of hired studio work. Cooke was among the few who would publicly claim, “If this is our music, why don’t we own it?” In New Orleans he created the All for One Executives organization (AFO) to pool the best of local black talent and to basically “own the sessions” their musicians played in. In Los Angeles Cooke set up Soul Station #1, a recording studio through which he had planned to invite local black musicians to audition and record on their own terms. Cooke had plans to expand Soul Stations in other cities along the lines of the Black Muslims who were utilizing the resources of the community on their own terms.24
By 1963 the contradictions between civil rights, Jim Crow, and his own celebrity had taken their toll. In October, shortly after the Birmingham church bombing, Cooke and his entourage attempted to check in to the all-white Holiday Inn in Shreveport, Louisiana. After being rebuked (despite his confirmation) and complaining to the hotel staff, Cooke and his entire party left—and were later tracked down at the Negro hotel across town and arrested for disturbing the peace. The incident had a lot to do with Cooke’s inclusion of the phrase “I go to the movies and I go downtown / somebody keep telling me, ‘Don’t hang around’ “ in the lyrics to his upcoming song. On December 21, 1963, Cooke went into the RCA Studios in Los Angeles with his trusted arranger Rene Hall and completed his masterpiece.
With an incessant pull on the heartstrings and a towering vocal authority, the normally laid-back Cooke wails intensely on the recording, putting as much blues into the song as he can. The ever so intimately felt lyrics resonated with movement workers and mainstream sympathizers alike. Daniel Wolff explains how “A Change Is Gonna Come” brought about a synthesis of many musical styles, foregrounding the stylistic changes that were to come:
“Change” opens in a wash of strings with a French horn calling, then [drummer Earl] Palmer finds an easy beat, and Sam comes in testifying—his voice up high in its range and urgent. He was born by the river in a little tent. If that sounds like gospel—born again in some tent-revival baptism—when he adds that he’s been running ever since, we’re into the blues. [Chuck] Badie’s heartbeat of a bass line gives an undertone of sadness as Sam hits the chorus for the first time: a change is gonna come. Next, he borrows a line from “Ol’ Man River”—afraid of living, scared of dying—and, in one phrase, the Reverend’s son passes out of the realm of gospel, announcing that he doesn’t know what’s up there, “beyond the sky.” Still, a change is gonna come.25
In a single stroke, Sam Cooke had transcended gospel and yet honored the tradition; he delivered the blues like he had never done before, yet he pointed forward, toward an emerging new world that he himself was tirelessly helping to engineer.
The song emerged slowly on the scene, as the last song on Cooke’s 1964 album Ain’t That Good News, with the record company releasing upbeat singles from the disc at first. As 1964 wore on, and wore on Sam Cooke, it became clear that the song deserved more visibility, and Cooke insisted that it be released as a single. He would not live to see it released as a single or become an anthem of a generation’s hopes and dreams. He was shot by a motel manager in Los Angeles on December 11, 1964. The song saturated the black-music radio waves throughout the spring of 1965, through the wake of Malcolm X’s murder, through the Watts riots in August, and through a decade of tumultuous change.
The soul music of the mid-1960s managed to exude an energy that belied its formal structure. A spirit thrived in the recordings that was revolutionary in a great many ways, despite the fact that the songs were typically in the three-minute range and designed for mainstream radio airplay. They nevertheless were part of the landscape of revolution in the air. Los Angeles-based DJ Magnificent Montague provides the following commentary on the soul sounds of the mid-sixties:
Now get your old turntable out and listen to the soul music of 1966. Listen to Slim Harpo sing “Baby Scratch My Back” and Sam and Dave sing “Hold On! I’m Comin’ “ and Lee Dorsey sing “Working in the Coal Mine” and Stevie Wonder sing “Uptight” or “I Was Made to Love Her” and Percy Sledge sing “When a Man Loves a Woman” and Wilson Pickett sing “634-5789” and Junior Walker sing “Road Runner” and Eddie Floyd sing “Knock on Wood” and Otis Redding sing “Try a Little Tenderness” and the Capitols sing “Cool Jerk.” Listen to how, even though the melodies stay in church, rapturous, the pressure is rising, as though the performers are testing you—challenging you, demanding you listen. The horn arrangements are even sharper, a little more forceful. The rhythm, out of the box, is a little faster, more dramatic. The combined effect is overwhelming. You can’t sit still. The singer and the arrangement are tugging at you, wanting to make your head explode. The song builds and builds until the singer comes back after the chorus and hits the third stanza with a scream, a desire to release, to crawl out of the tensions that imprison him, to take you with him. It’s like a riot, a controlled, melodious riot that is just about to break. It would break, by ‘68, the year that James Brown let the funk machine run wild and released “I’m Black and I’m Proud” and turned our music away from church. We weren’t at that point in ‘66 but we were close to the edge, closer than we realized.26
In the mid-1960s a pungent scent of anticipation could be sensed in the popular music of the day, but it would not last. The calamitous end of the decade would offer sights and sounds that would compel the most cautious black music artists to expand their lyrical range, and their musical visions, to accommodate the chaotic new world that they were living in.
One artist who transcended his own boundaries to become a signpost for the movement was the iconic Marvin Gaye. As the social changes around him swirled, the revolution was pushing Marvin toward a personal and social artistic triumph. Born and raised in a strict Pentecostal religious home in Washington, DC, Gaye was a troubled genius from day one. His father beat Marvin regularly and shamed the young man for having aspirations outside of the church. Marvin eventually left home and became a secular singer and drummer. Branching out into secular performance much like Sam Cooke, Gaye found his niche as an appealing young pop singer and quickly rose to the forefront of Motown Records once he was introduced to Berry Gordy by singer Harvey Fuqua.
After sparkling early success with singles such as “Hitch Hike” and “Pride and Joy,” Gaye’s triumphant duets earned him another level of pop adoration as his playful banter with partner Tammi Terrell reinforced his appeal as the most desirable Motown male artist of the 1960s. But tragedy was right around the corner. After complaining of headaches before a show, Tammi Terrell collapsed in Gaye’s arms onstage at a concert at a small Virginia college on October 14, 1967. After a two-yearlong convalescence, Terrell passed away in March 1970 of a brain tumor at the age of twenty-four.
Moody and depressed from the steady decline of Tammi Terrell, Marvin took to his brother Frankie’s letters of war in Vietnam. Frankie returned from a harrowing three-year tour of duty in Vietnam that spring of 1970. The joy of his brother’s return was tempered by the stark realities of the war recounted nightly by Frankie Gaye to his brother. It would take months of seclusion and introspection before Marvin would reemerge and began a reappraisal of his craft. It would take the movement and the music working upon one another to bring Marvin back.
In 1969 the Motown standard-bearers the Four Tops were performing in the San Francisco Bay Area. Bass singer Renaldo “Obie” Benson found himself riveted to the televised accounts of the local protests taking place over People’s Park in Berkeley. The People’s Park “riots” were some of the most chaotic domestic disturbances in the country. Because of the fixed location—a small block of unused land three blocks south of the UC-Berkeley campus—the series of street confrontations that took place over the land could be witnessed by the media unabated. The Bay Area had already seen its share of violent antiwar confrontations, and earlier that spring the University of California at Berkeley had weathered a disruptive student strike in demand of a Third World College. Tensions were high. In April 1969 a group of students and community activists (some veterans of the 1964 Free Speech Movement at Berkeley) decided to rebuild the abandoned lot by planting trees and developing a free public-use park. Local officials, however, saw the effort as an attack on the property rights of the university. While local officials tried to negotiate with the young trespassers, Governor Ronald Reagan saw the event as an insurrection and ordered hundreds of police and later National Guard troops to destroy the park—and to use tear gas and open fire with deadly buckshot to repel the protestors. The conflict had reached a point where National Guard troops were guarding vacant plots of land in the city in case someone tried to plant something there.27
The unprecedented violence during those days was striking. It moved Obie Benson to reconsider everything.
All the kids up there with the long hair and everything. The police was beatin’ on them, but they weren’t bothering anybody. I saw this and started wondering what the fuck was going on. What is happening here? One question leads to another. Why are they sending kids so far away from their families overseas? Why are they attacking their own children in the streets here? And so on.28
It was as a result of these chaotic Bay Area events that Benson penned the first version of “What’s Going On?” Benson first offered the song to his own group, the Four Tops. The Four Tops, while not known for explicit message music, were standard-bearers for relevant soul songs about dignity in relationships and were quite respected Motown superstars in their own rights. The group, however, rejected Benson’s composition. Benson continued on with his song and claims that on a tour in London he offered the song to folksinger Joan Baez, who turned him down as well.
Back in Detroit, Benson developed the song further with Al Cleveland, and Cleveland approached Marvin Gaye with the song. Gaye initially offered to produce the record for one of his side projects, the singing group the Originals. Benson then had to enlist the help of Gaye’s wife, Anna, who literally forced Marvin to claim the work for himself. Gaye was finally driven to record the song, on his terms, and crafted a soul masterpiece in the process.
Father, father
We don’t need to escalate
You see, war is not the answer
For only love can conquer hate.
The original single was recorded in June 1970 and was released in January 1971, around the same time the Lumpen were in operation. The success of the song inspired Gaye to pen an entire album of music around the same theme, lamenting, cherishing, and worshipping at the altar of life in a turbulent, post-movement world. In a sense Marvin Gaye was capturing a eulogy for the movement, as so many issues he dealt with—endless war, police brutality, drug abuse, environmental destruction, and the long-lost chance at spiritual redemption—were presenting a hopeless landscape of the post-movement world. Yet as he was depicting these harsh realities, the music, the music was transcendent; it was an exaltation of what precisely was possible in the human spirit to overcome these obstacles. As lush and orchestrated as the What’s Going On album is, the purpose served was closer to some of the greatest blues music—the tone, the feel, the spirit, the hope embedded in the sound rose above all of the melancholy to provide a spiritually transcendent moment.
Marvin Gaye was a fan of the Black Panthers, to a degree, as his brother Frankie Gaye explained in his memoir Marvin Gaye, My Brother:
At one point during his stretch of songwriting, Marvin took a break to do interviews … in support of the Black Panthers and the Black Power movement. Marvin loved the Panthers even though he never completely agreed with their policies. “What I like, I really like,” he admitted. “The brothers need waking up because so many of us are being killed and hurt. There’s no need for the beatings and shootings that go on in the inner city. And too many of our people are homeless and going hungry. The Panthers go door-to door for donations of food or money to help the poor. I support that.”
What Marvin didn’t support, actually despised, was the Panthers’ militant and often violent actions, along with their antigovernment stance. Nor could he tolerate what he called “the pig thing,” the Panthers’ attitude toward the police. We had been brought up to respect the police, not to mess with them. We knew there were things they didn’t always do right…. We knew about the shootings and beatings, but we were taught to believe that the majority of cops were good, and only a few gave them a bad name.29
Marvin Gaye became in many ways an icon of social soul music: music with a message that possesses all of the sincerity and moral authority of earlier blues and soul music, but was now invested in a relationship with the larger world. Gaye’s intimate approach to soul was far more complex, and it would be bared for all the world to see.
After the robust success of What’s Going On, Marvin Gaye had initially considered a subsequent message-music album as a follow-up. Recording in the same format as the What’s Going On album sessions, Marvin Gaye went into the studio with a detailed message song and recorded a diatribe against the power structure with a level of detail not heard on the previous album:
Politics and hypocrites
Is turning us all into lunatics
Can you take the guns from our sons?
Right all the wrongs this administration has done?
On “You’re the Man” Marvin Gaye sought out civic involvement in the form of the vote, claiming, “If you’ve got a plan, if you’ve got a master plan, I got to vote for you.” It would not be a stretch to imagine Gaye’s reference to “the master plan” was influenced by the Panthers’ Ten Point Program. In the Ten Point Program, well known to all who read about the Party, was a master plan for black liberation. It was a relevant question for the start of the decade—”Who’s the man with the master plan?’ The history of black politics in the 1970s reminds us that as a result of Hoover and Nixon’s COINTELPRO program, there were few people with a master plan for black liberation remaining by the time of Gaye’s composition.
Despite Gaye’s vivid detail of his social awareness—rhymed over a streetwise funk groove—the approach did not take off as his single “What’s Going On?” had a year before. Sales for the single “You’re the Man” were marginal. Facing rejection again, Gaye abandoned the social-commentary album idea, turned away from direct message music, and turned inward. He next arranged an instrumental album for the film Trouble Man, an apropos name if there ever was one for an artist. The melodic instrumental work was quintessentially Marvin at the moment and served to establish him as an arranger with impeccable credentials. Gaye then plunged full force into bringing his own hedonistic fantasies to life through music. The resulting album-length works, Let’s Get It On and I Want You were easily as popular as What’s Going On. In a certain way, Marvin Gaye had become more of a rebel with Let’s Get It On, as he was going on his own, regardless of the critics or the social values; he was going to express himself on his own terms.
The black music tradition had reached a zenith with What’s Going On. All of the pain and suffering, all of the blues, all of the conflicts, all of the funk, all of the screams from the streets, and all of the sophistication of black art had come together in one moment. Black music could now aspire to be elegant and streetwise at once. Black sophistication did not mean social aloofness, and street consciousness did not have to mean desperation or demeaning self-images. An epiphany of black liberation was achieved by What’s Going On.
Larger social issues were becoming a part of the lexicon of black popular music. The impact of the Vietnam War on the rock music world remains a part of the American social fabric, and the many twists the music and the performers and the audiences took those crucial 1969 to 1971 years has provided an indelible stamp on the history of popular and protest music in America. An equally robust and radical impact was felt on black musicians and could be heard in their music as well. In many cases the artists were responding to their own personal experiences as well as the explicit nature of the war on television, not yet censored by government propagandists as it would be in later US military conflicts. In fact, it could be argued that the explicit violence and social contradictions that were exposed and articulated by popular performers in response to the Vietnam War provided the opening for black artists to dispose, once and for all, with the tradition of implication and innuendo and start to tell their own harsh, bitter truths in lyrically explicit terms.
Some of the most dramatic turns in black music took place from 1969 to ‘71, the time the Lumpen were performing. The epic performances of Jimi Hendrix and Sly and the Family Stone at Woodstock in 1969, the jazz fusion experiments of Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew and Jack Johnson sessions, the first recordings by Mandrill, Kool and the Gang, Earth, Wind & Fire, Ohio Players, and Funkadelic sparked a decade of black musical innovation. The goal for many was no longer the three-minute 45 rpm single, it was to make a statement with their craft.
The radical times of the day were reflected in the extreme reactions by some established soul artists to expand far beyond the established standards of the sound as the new decade beckoned. “Progressive soul” was an industry term for music that connected the genres of rock, jazz, blues, and gospel into something never before heard. The beloved Curtis Mayfield surprised many with his turn to psychedelia on his first solo album, released in October 1970, with the eight-minute opening track “(Don’t Worry) If There’s a Hell Below We’re All Going to Go.” The reorganization at Stax Records in Memphis allowed artists such as Isaac Hayes to stretch out and record extended ten-plus-minute bedroom vamps over music, redefining a free-form sound of soul. The Isley Brothers fled Motown in 1969, tired of their standard pop fare, and began to produce stronger groove-oriented funk such as “It’s Your Thing” and “Get Into Something.” They let loose youngest brother Ernie Isley to mimic their onetime sideman Jimi Hendrix, and as a result produced some extended powerhouse rock songs delivered with their trademark affecting vocalizing. In 1971 they went against their type once again and recorded an entire album of soulful covers of rock tunes. The album, Givin’ It Back, features covers of Neil Young’s “Ohio,” Bob Dylan’s “Lay Lady Lay,” and Steven Stills’s “Love the One You’re With.” It was clearly a bold statement across the racial divide, done with a soulful approach. This was done on the heels of the emerging psychedelic soul of the Temptations, Billy Paul, the Undisputed Truth, and Stevie Wonder’s plunge into electronics and atmospheric moods on his 1971 album Where I’m Coming From.
The established midwestern soul singer Gene McDaniels had earned a reputation with his vocal clarity, articulate and yet passionate delivery, and thoughtful lyrics on ballads such as “Tower of Strength” and “A Hundred Pounds of Clay” in 1962. After enduring the turbulent sixties, he reemerged as the iconoclastic “Eugene McDaniels, the Left Reverend McD,” penning the well-traveled tome to despair “Compared to What?” and two of the most esoteric and visionary albums of the era, Outlaw and Headless Heroes of the Apocalypse. Headless Heroes is a mélange of folksy rock, extroverted jazz and soul, bitter Dylan-esque irony, lighthearted whimsy, and deep discontent. McDaniels’s twisted turn earned him the wrath of Vice President Spiro Agnew, who was informed of McDaniels’s harsh critique on Headless Heroes and contacted executives at Atlantic Records, urging them to remove the record. The album was shelved.30
Eventually bizarre became the norm for soul singers on the edge. The Florida-based soul singer Clarence Reid was a marginal yet feisty rhythm and blues talent, churning out such kicking fare as “Nobody But You Babe” and “I’m Your Yes Man” in the late 1960s. Working out of the studios that turned out Latimore, Betty Wright, and KC and the Sunshine Band, Clarence Reid could have continued along a career of moderate mainstream soul music success. Instead Reid donned a costume, cape, and mask and turned his career inside out by taking on the filthy rhyming persona of Blowfly. In 1971 Reid employed the same Florida-based band that backed up Betty Wright’s top-selling hit “Clean Up Woman” and produced the album The Weird World of Blowfly. This session featured such absurdity as a send-up of “Soul Man” called “Hole Man,” “Spermy Night in Georgia,” and “Shitting on the Dock of the Bay.” Blowfly pushed the pop music parody to the limit, yet it somehow reflected the radical nature of the times. Reid’s Blowfly was by no means the first of its kind, and his contemporaries Redd Foxx, Rudy Ray Moore, and Pigmeat Markham were all adept at the quick-witted raunchy rhyme. Reid, however, built his act almost entirely around X-rated parodies of soul music.
In 1967 a little known doo-wop outfit from Plainfield, New Jersey, called the Parliaments, led by an obscure industry hustler named George Clinton, scored a top five R&B hit with “(I Wanna) Testify.” For their first tour in 1967 the group recruited local Plainfield musicians Billy Nelson (bass) and Eddie Hazel (guitar), then undertook a 180-degree turnabout and morphed into the black rock band Funkadelic. Funkadelic shows featured black performers in outrageous costumes and exaggerated stage behavior, punishing guitar chords and eerie keyboard sound effects, and “the Parliaments’” vocalists harmonizing amidst their psychedelic brethren. For some, Parliament/Funkadelic was evidence that soul had reached its apocalypse. For Clinton, it was just a sign of the times. “We couldn’t keep our ties alike, couldn’t keep our shirts clean, hair was always undone, you realize the reality of that was really silly, especially when the hippies had just hit the scene and it was hip to be, you know, funky looking. We didn’t have a whole bunch of hit records to do it anyway, so it was natural for us to become hippies,” George Clinton recalled. “We found out the vibe was more important than them actually hearing us. But I knew then that it was more about making faces, jamming and having a good time.”31 On their song “Wars of Armageddon” from their 1971 Maggot Brain album, members of the band could be heard chanting, “More power to the pussy / more pussy to the power,” an edgy twist to the prevailing black radical milieu.
At the end of 1969, the great black rock guitarist Jimi Hendrix took a radical turn of his own. As a result of a contract dispute, Hendrix was obligated to produce a onetime album for another label. The new album involved his army buddy and bass player, Billy Cox, and the living mountain of a drummer, Buddy Miles. The all-black power-rock trio—the Band of Gypsys—produced a never-before-heard amalgam of punishing guitar riffs over crisp rhythm and blues grooves along with soaring soul vocalizing from R&B veteran Miles. The funk-rock sound would change the face of black music, setting a template for the spectacular glam-funk of the 1970s. One of the original songs debuted during those sessions was the Hendrix composition “Power of Soul,” which encapsulated the ideals of these black rock and rollers from their soul roots:
With the Power of Soul
Anything is possible!
With the power of you
Anything you wanna do!32
The impact of Jimi Hendrix on black popular music and black artists was enormous. Bootsy Collins, collaborator with George Clinton’s Parliament/Funkadelic (P-Funk), credits Hendrix with changing the entire social and musical landscape for his generation:
Jimi Hendrix was the cat that said not only can you play guitar, I want you to come up front and do the wild thing. Back in that day, brothers wasn’t cool with being freaky and being out there like that. We hadn’t caught up to that yet…. It was in a time when we didn’t even want to be called black. And James Brown came through and made “Say it loud I’m black and I’m proud”—and that’s when we started to like being black…. And I think that’s why me getting with George [Clinton] helped bring the black people on board as to what Jimi was really doing.33
There are a number of accounts of the popular black rock star and his relationship to the Black Panther Party. Hendrix was asked to perform at a number of benefits for the Party, but Hendrix’s managers were adamant about canceling them, double booking, rumor spinning, and avoiding all public exposure of the Hendrix-Panther connection. While his public statements about the Party were often cryptic, implying that there needed to be no need for them, Jimi Hendrix nevertheless often held court regarding the Panthers, and according to biographer David Henderson, “Jimi was acquainted with Black Panthers on the East and West coasts. Several high-ranking Party members had had discussions with Jimi about a benefit performance.” Hendrix biographer Charles Shaar Murray provides an account of how Jimi’s white bass player, Noel Redding, was caught in the black radical crossfire:
Hendrix was, after all, the only black rock star with a massive white audience, and he was correctly perceived by the Black Panther Party and others as having a vast influence on the young whites who followed him. He was thus courted by the Panthers—Noel Redding was once highly miffed to find himself virtually excluded from the Experience’s dressing room by a Panther delegation with whom Hendrix was having a meeting.34
Jimi Hendrix appears to have taken advantage of many opportunities to express his solidarity with the Panthers. On the final set of his groundbreaking New Year’s Eve/New Year’s Night 1969/70 concerts at the Fillmore East in New York City, Hendrix anounced: “We’re going to do this song, the Black Panthers’ national anthem,” and proceeded into a thundering rendition of “Voodoo Chile (Slight Return).” On May 30, 1970, in Berkeley, Jimi Hendrix proclaimed his solidarity with the Panthers after performing his own rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner”: “Now we’re going to play our American anthem…. This is especially dedicated to People’s Park, and especially the Black Panthers.”
Aaron Dixon, captain of the Seattle Black Panther Party chapter, recalled that Jimi asked the Panthers to handle security for him during his 1970 concert in Seattle, the last performance in his hometown.
Whenever he performed in Seattle he always dedicated a song to the Black Panther Party. And so we were really elated when he asked us to provide the security for his last concert in Seattle. The management called our office and told us that Jimi wanted us to do the security for him. It was an outdoor concert, in Seattle, Seattle Six stadium. I remember it was a light rain coming down. I remember he burned up a couple of guitars, and he was his old self.
Jimi Hendrix did more than simply give shout-outs to black radicals. Jimi himself was a radical black, a living example for some of what a completely liberated black man could be. Aaron Dixon recognized this even as he was standing guard representing the Black Panthers at Jimi’s concert.
There was so much great music at that time, so much great music from the white community, from the black community and Jimi Hendrix just brought the two together…. Jimi really represented this whole rebellious nature of young America. When he passed away, that was kind of a changing of this whole thing that had been taking place in the late ‘60s.35
In a poetic sense, Hendrix and the Panthers were flip sides of the same revolutionary coin. The Panthers gave a generation the courage to demand freedom, and Hendrix was able to allow that generation to imagine what freedom looked and sounded like.
The Black Panther Party inspired rock artists of all persuasions to indulge in their outrage at the system, their outrage at racial injustice, and simply to let the world know of their angst at the loudest possible volume. The Michigan-based hard-rock quintet MC5 (Motor City Five) was a noise machine that is considered a forerunner of the punk movement in the United States. In October 1968 the group performed an eighteen-minute swamp blues blowout called “I’m Mad Like Eldridge Cleaver” live at the Grande Ballroom in Detroit. Their onetime manager and activist John Sinclair was inspired by Huey Newton to create the “White Panthers,” a cultural group that advocated free love, rock and roll, the legalization of marijuana, and the “abolishment of capitalism.”
Other established rock artists, most notably John Lennon and the Grateful Dead, pursued positive relationships with the Black Panther Party. After a chance meeting with Huey Newton on a cross-country airplane flight, members of the popular Bay Area-based Grateful Dead engaged in a lengthy conversation with the Panther cofounder. Shortly afterward, the Grateful Dead performed at Revolutionary Intercommunal Day of Solidarity for Bobby Seale, a benefit for the Black Panther Party on March 5, 1971, at the Oakland Auditorium Arena in downtown Oakland. The Lumpen also performed at the daylong event. Another Grateful Dead concert at Wesleyan University during the Bobby Seale/Ericka Huggins trial in nearby New Haven, Connecticut, was promoted as a Panther benefit by the local Black Student Union, lending credence to the popularity of the Dead and their connection to the Panthers.36
The rock and roll superstar John Lennon emerged as a vocal social critic on the American scene once he was removed from the obligations of his original band. The Beatles delivered their share of pithy social critiques on their irreverent and beloved pop singles such as “Revolution” and “Back in the USSR.” As a solo artist, Lennon recorded the rousing rock and roll single “Power to the People” that went to #12 on the American pop singles chart in the spring of 1971—just as the Lumpen were using the chant on every song of their weekly performances. (The Lennon song was interpolated by Michael Franti on his popular chant “Power to the Peaceful” during the early 2000s.) Later that year Lennon spoke publicly of his friendship with Bobby Seale, and introduced Seale to a daytime syndicated television audience of The Mike Douglass Show during Lennon’s week as guest host.37 John Lennon and his wife, Yoko Ono, were publicly involved in social issues at the time and were aware of their potential as artists to bring this change about. Their impact was given an injection when the two headlined (along with Stevie Wonder) a concert in Detroit to free MC5 manager John Sinclair, who had been imprisoned for handing two joints to a female undercover officer. Three days after the concert, Sinclair was released.
The Panthers were part and parcel of the counterculture of resistance and antiwar activism associated with rock music culture at the time. The cultural front of black power was the last battleground of the Black Panther Party.
The highest-profile Party member to be associated with music was eventual Panther Party chairman Elaine Brown, who recorded two albums of defiant protest music in the midst of her BPP tenure. Her first album, Seize the Time, was recorded in 1969 for Vault, and the second (for Black Forum/Motown in 1973) was recorded with the help of Motown executive Suzanne de Passe, who became personal friends with Brown. Brown’s two albums’ worth of self-penned messages of black pride and Panther power were artistic renderings in a class by themselves. The structure of her music was decidedly different from that of the Lumpen. Her musical style was aesthetically closer to the traditional ballad-driven protest music of Paul Robeson than the rowdy rhythmic aesthetics of rhythm and blues. Lumpen member William Calhoun explains the differences between their respective forms of revolutionary music:
Elaine had been doing some music with the Party before, but Elaine’s stuff was more jazz kind of oriented, I guess is the best way to put it. My musical roots came from James Brown and Ray Charles. So, we were a little closer to the funk. And people reacted a little differently to us. We were a little funkier I guess.38
Elaine Brown’s passionate revolutionary ballads were a favorite of Huey P. Newton, who encouraged her work. Brown and Newton’s personal relationship undoubtedly played a role, as did the fact that Newton was a classical music fan and was not known as a good dancer, and as such was perhaps inclined to prefer her music to the jumping and shouting at Lumpen shows.
Elaine Brown was raised in the tough working-class neighborhoods of Philadelphia, but her mother provided her with a number of upscale opportunities to attend private schools, take ballet and music classes, and learn the trappings of wealth, all the while growing up in poverty. She began to write songs as a youth, generally about teenage angst and relationships. Once out of high school, Brown moved to Los Angeles to pursue an entertainment career. After struggling as a cocktail waitress at the infamous Pink Pussycat club, she enrolled in Los Angeles City College and developed as a student activist. Brown began to write poetry and music for the revolution. The night of one of her poetry readings, at which she chastised black men in the movement, she became an inaugural member of the Southern California chapter of the Black Panther Party.
Los Angeles was one of the most violent locales for Party activity. Brown was on the UCLA campus when the infamous shooting occurred between Panthers and members of Karenga’s US Organization on January 17, 1969, which resulted in the murders of Alprentice “Bunchy” Carter and John Huggins. On the night of Bunchy Carter’s funeral, Chief of Staff David Hilliard was told about Brown’s revolutionary songs. Brown discusses that evening in her autobiography.
Masai [Hewitt, Panther leader and minister of education] had told him I wrote revolutionary songs. David wanted to hear them before going back to Oakland. He ordered Geronimo to find a piano and to gather everyone in the area together to listen. There had been too much pain for me to be embarrassed about it. I sang him the song for Franco, “The Panther,” and the one for Eldridge, “The Meeting.” I sang the one written at Sybil Brand for Bunchy and John: “Assassination.” David cried and ordained that the one for Eldridge become the Black Panther National Anthem.39
According to Brown, Hilliard then ordered that copies of the “Black Panther National Anthem” be distributed around the organization and that Elaine record an entire album of her songs. Brown and her musical director, the accomplished jazz artist Horace Tapscott, recorded her first album, Seize the Time, under constant police surveillance. Brown states in her autobiography: “The joy I felt in making the music was undercut by the presence of the police, who followed us every day, who sat outside the Vault recording studio during the sessions, who stopped and delayed us going to and from the studio. They were omnipresent.”40
While the music didn’t play on black radio, it did not go unnoticed. Tapscott arranged the horns, strings, and piano accompaniment that stretched the dramatic tension of Brown’s voice. She displayed command of her tone and could sustain impassioned notes at a feverish pitch. Brown combined her piano recital training with her radical politics to write compelling music for the revolution. On “The End of Silence” she makes clear what is necessary for the revolutionary fight:
You know that dignity, not just equality
Is what makes a man a man …
Well then believe it my friend that this silence can end
We’ll just have to get guns and be men.
Brown wrote with a reverence for black men that went far beyond typical romantic lyrics. It is illustrative of the male-centered thrust of Brown’s revolutionary politics that she would implore her listeners to “get guns and be men.” Certainly the figurative methods of music making are fair game for metaphorical license, and Brown was a skilled poet and lyricist. In terms of the prevailing conceptions of patriarchal strength, courage, and militancy, Elaine Brown meant what she said.
On “The Meeting,” Elaine Brown wrote and sang about the dynamic and controversial Minister of Information Eldridge Cleaver as a representation of black manhood that people had been waiting for.
I said, Man, where have you been for all these years
Man, where were you, when I sought you
Man, do you know me as I know you
Man, am I coming through?
In her commentary about the album, Elaine Brown was candid about the point of her work:
I used to write about flowers and butterflies and love. That kind of bullshit. But now since I’ve joined the Panthers, my words are hard and concrete and there’s no abstract, esoteric message. Things are laid out clearly, so that people can understand how we feel.41
“The Panther” was another example:
He is a hero, he walks with night
His spirit’s beauty, his soul is right …
His face is black and he would die for you
To get your freedom back.
Elaine Brown’s music stands as a window into the workings of a black radical organization at its social, political, and cultural zenith. She was referred to then as “the Songwriter for the Black Panther Party.” However the Party was not stable enough to develop their cultural apparatus much further beyond the production of her albums and the Lumpen’s performances. In many ways, Elaine Brown’s musical work, much like her work in Party leadership in the 1970s has been overshadowed historically by the glare of the gun in the hands of the Panther.
There were other musical ventures by Panther Party members. Other chapters in other cities had singing groups, and volunteer entertainment was a staple of Panther social events and recruitment throughout the Party’s lifetime. But the entire Party design was implemented in Oakland. In the 1970s the Black Panthers’ liberation school developed into a successful charter school in Oakland, originally called the Intercommunal Youth Instutute and later the Oakland Community School. Ericka Huggins directed the institute through most of its existence, and it had its own choir and an Intercommunal Youth Band directed by Charles Moffeit. The Panthers’ award-winning work lasted nearly a decade and educated hundreds of Oakland students while requiring no tuition. Veteran Panther Huggins served on the Alameda County Board of Education while directing the institute. She endured some of the most tumultuous periods in Panther history and established a lasting legacy as an educator. Legendary soul singer Lenny Williams knew many of the Panthers well in the 1970s and explains the unique circumstances of the female leadership of the Party as only he could:
Ericka is just a sweetheart, you know, but a very strong woman. I mean, you look at those women like Ericka and Elaine Brown, I mean, those women, when Huey was gone they controlled the party. And you know, these are women that are controlling men that are carrying guns and men that’ll fight and men that’ll lay down their lives and die for a cause, so these weren’t the ordinary women that’s going to kowtow to what a man says and, you know, that you could just, I mean shoot, they were women so they loved to be touched and loved and cared for as women might like, you know, but you couldn’t shuck and jive them, that’s one thing for sure. So it took a hell of a man to be involved with Ericka and Elaine and some of the other women that were there at the party.42
Among the most intriguing intersections of Panther politics and popular music was Huey Newton’s affection for the works of Bob Dylan, the enigmatic folksinger and iconic social commentator of the 1960s. Dylan’s ability to pierce the soul of the listener with his poignant, stark, and often surrealistic narratives of bleak times and impending social upheaval skyrocketed him to the center of the rebel rock generation’s search for meaning through the medium of music. Born in Minnesota as Robert Allen Zimmerman in 1941, the young singer patterned himself after the great depression-era folksinger Woody Guthrie, and many of his fans saw him as a modern-day troubadour of the contemporary disillusioned youth of America. In terms of his stark renderings of life on songs like “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” Dylan could easily be compared to Woody Guthrie or Guthrie’s political mentor, the left-leaning Pete Seeger. Playing a twangy guitar and singing with an equally twanging voice, Dylan presented lyrics that were the unique feature of his appeal, and for Dylan, the overwhelming social changes in the United States during the early 1960s were captured with a brilliance unmeasured. Songs like “The Times They Are A-Changin’ “ and “Only a Pawn in Their Game” revealed issues and brought to life characters with a deep dislocation from American mainstream mores and values. His first major hit, “Blowin’ in the Wind” was a major inspiration for Sam Cooke’s foray into message music. Dylan’s ideas resonated with a generation of youth just facing the Vietnam War draft and the moral torrent of the civil rights movement.
Dylan’s ability to dislodge himself from the prevailing tenets of society and yet signify on many deeply held literary themes and ideas made him an irresistible social force—and an overnight celebrity in 1963 when his second full-length album The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan was released on Columbia. Just as Malcolm X was solidifying his hold on the disillusionment of black Americans at the dawn of the 1960s, Dylan was the accomplished voice of the distraught and disoriented white rebel youth. The stark messages in “Masters of War” and “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall” provided a strong appeal for a dislocated generation. Robbie Robertson summed up the tenor of Dylan during this dangerous period:
I could hear the politics in the early songs. It’s very exciting to hear somebody singing so powerfully, with something to say. But what struck me was how the street had had such a profound effect on him: coming from Minnesota, setting out on the road and coming into New York. There was a hardness, a toughness, in the way he approached his songs and the characters in them. That was a rebellion, in a certain way, against the purity of folk music. He wasn’t pussyfooting around on “Like a Rolling Stone” or “Ballad of a Thin Man.” This was the rebel rebelling against the rebellion.43
Huey Newton played Dylan’s music regularly and ordered it played at various times around Party functions. Dylan’s album Highway 61 Revisited could be heard routinely during the Panther paper shipping night. Every Panther in the inner circle was aware of Huey’s affection for Dylan, and Huey made sure they all knew of the symbolism and messages in Dylan’s work. Dylan showed a deep respect for the blues and blues forms and understood the passion and nuance of blues standards. Blues lyrics are generally circumspect, open to interpretation, and full of metaphor. Dylan’s lyrics, however, are often either painfully direct or disorientingly abstract.
Early in his career, however, Dylan performed a withering treatment of the Emmett Till case. Emmett Till was a fourteen-year-old Chicago boy who during a 1955 visit to Mississippi was accused of “sassing” a white woman in a store and was subsequently lynched by her acquaintances. The perpetrators of the crime freely admitted their deeds and were still acquitted by an all-white Mississippi jury. The case was significant because of both the courage of the black Mississippians to accuse the whites of the crime in court—a major breakthrough of resistance at the time—and the media coverage of the event, one of the first televised trials in the United States, as well as due to the recurring publishing of the photograph of young Emmett Till’s misshapen head in the casket at his Chicago funeral, deliberately left open by Till’s mother, so “everyone could see what they did to my baby.”
Bob Dylan’s rendition rolls like a coal miner tragedy or other Depression-era account of folk-song despair, and his lyricism is as biting as ever: “This boy’s fateful tragedy you should all remember well / The color of his skin was black and his name was Emmett Till” went the introduction. The details of the deed were not missed by Dylan:
They tortured him and did some things too evil to repeat
There was screaming sounds inside the barn, there was laughing sounds out on the street.
It was a rarity at the time for any artist (and especially rare for black artists) to address such a painful topic with the amount of realism in the words.
In 1964 Dylan traveled to the South, along with Joan Baez and Pete Seeger, where he witnessed the courage of SNCC workers firsthand and, as Mike Marqusee put it, “was awed by their courage and commitment, suffering and directness.” He performed his song “Only a Pawn in Their Game” for the sharecroppers there, who undoubtedly appreciated his efforts if they did not fully appreciate the aesthetics of his style.44
Perhaps Dylan’s most significant work in terms of the Panthers was the surrealistic “Ballad of a Thin Man” from his 1965 album Highway 61 Revisited. The slow, foreboding tension of the song backgrounds a harrowing visit by a “Mr. Jones” to a freakshow, in which he horrifyingly realizes that in some way the freaks he came to see are reflections of himself.
You hand in your ticket and you go watch the geek
Who immediately walks up to you when he hears you speak
and says, “How does it feel to be such a freak?”
The layers of meaning in “Ballad of a Thin Man” have been debated extensively over the years by followers who claim, among other possibilities, that Mr. Jones is a naive journalist confronted with the spectacle of Dylan’s genius/madness or is a series of allusions to a gay strip joint, which he walks into with a “pencil” and is confronted by a “one-eyed midget” and other curious characters. While some Dylan followers dismiss the record as nonsensical, some have clung to the lyrics of “Thin Man” with a zeal. Huey Newton was captivated by “Ballad of a Thin Man” and insisted that his fellow Panthers listen carefully to the symbolism and meaning within the song. Bobby Seale, in his memoir, Seize the Time, recounted his encounter with Huey and the “Thin Man”:
Huey P. Newton made me recognize the lyrics. Not only the lyrics of the record, but what the lyrics meant in the record. What the lyrics meant in the history of racism that has perpetuated itself in this world…. The point about the geek is very important because this is where Huey hung me.
… He doesn’t like eating raw meat, or feathers but he does it to survive. But these people who are coming in to see him are coming in for entertainment, so they are the real freaks….
Huey says that whites looked at blacks as geeks, as freaks. But what is so symbolic about it is that when the revolution starts, they’ll call us geeks because we eat raw meat. But the geek turns around and hands Mr. Jones a naked bone and says, “How do you like being a freak?” And Mr. Jones says, “Oh my God, what the hell’s going on?”45
Dylan, through a sense of the dramatic and flirtation with the surreal, penetrates with an incisive linkage between the oppressor and the oppressed and how each defaces and dehumanizes the other. As Newton saw it, Bob Dylan managed to implicate all parties involved in the ruse that was America’s self-image, as tattered as it was in the 1960s.
The fact that the Black Panthers were adept at producing revolutionary theater in many of their proclamations speaks to the insights that Newton had been developing, influenced in part by the “Thin Man.” Much of the Panthers’ rhetoric was both literal and figurative at once, such as “The Sky’s the Limit” or “All Power to the People.” Their language could be taken at face value or interpreted on an in-depth level. The Ten Point Program, with its initial declarations followed by more detailed explanations of each point, is an example of how the Panthers attempted to deal on multiple levels with their audience. Yes, the Panthers sought to reach the brothers on the block, the hardened street toughs, on their terms, but there was another level of connection that Huey Newton was convinced he could impart to his followers. It is not an exaggeration to say that he gained some of these insights from listening to Bob Dylan.
Dylan’s most dramatic association with the Black Panthers was a song he wrote in 1971 after the death of George Jackson in the San Quentin prison yard. Jackson had joined the Party in prison after acquiring a one-year-to-life sentence for robbery in 1961. Jackson studied Marxism while in prison and was one of the founders of the Black Guerilla Army in 1966. While in Soledad Prison in 1969 Jackson was charged—along with two others, Fleeta Drumgo and John Clutchette—with the murder of a prison guard, and the Soledad Brothers became a cause célèbre. Jackson’s published letters from prison in 1970 reveal him to be among the most resolute and articulate of the many incarcerated rebels of the time. Jackson, for many (including Dylan), was seen as a pure revolutionary, one completely dedicated to the cause of revolutionary change, and in that sense, incorruptible. To his followers Jackson was as noble and rational as one could become, trapped in the cage that he was. This was perhaps his appeal to Bob Dylan.
In an assault that remains in dispute to this day, a prison “riot” took place on August 1, 1971, in which officials claim that Jackson “acquired” a gun, ordered or took part in the murders of prison guards and prisoners, and ran onto the prison yard, where he was shot by the prison guards from above. The circumstances of the prison riot and the means by which Jackson obtained a firearm in the middle of a maximum security federal prison are still unclear. As James Baldwin remarked at the time, “No Black person will ever believe that George Jackson died the way they tell us he did.”46 Nevertheless, George Jackson died that day, and his disturbing death sent a shock wave through those who saw him as perhaps the last of the pure revolutionaries of that era. Dylan certainly was one.
His lyrics were deeply personal, as Dylan sings of waking up with tears in his bed, after learning that a man he “really loved” had been killed, shot in the head. The chorus to the song was as sorrowful as any of Dylan’s work, as he wails to “the Lord” that “they cut George Jackson down” and reliving the funeral, he appears to be moaning as Jackson’s body is put to rest. In typical Dylan fashion, he delved deeper into the complex relationship of a political prisoner, as he rebuked the prison guards, who watched him from above and were “frightened of his power” and “scared of his love.”
Bob Dylan captured the sentiment of Jackson’s followers vividly in a way that only he could. While not a participant in the movement per se, Dylan was terribly moved by Jackson’s death and recorded two versions of the song, an acoustic and a full-band version, and demanded that his label release the single immediately with the lyrics on the single sleeve cover. In his own way, Bob Dylan directly addressed the revolution and revealed how deeply he was affected by it.
Dylan’s final verse to the song sums up his own despair and a somber global consciousness that harbors a stark resonance in modern times:
Sometimes I think this whole world
Is one big prison yard
Some of us are prisoners
The rest of us are guards.
The world as one big prison yard. Once again Dylan is quick to implicate everyone involved. Yes, many are imprisoned by the poverty and social misery of life at the bottom of society, but to frame the rest of the population as prison guards implicates everyone else as complicit in the literal economic incarceration of the world’s underprivileged. Once again, this time in an act of pure despair, Dylan had struck one of his master strokes.
While Dylan, like the Beatles and Jimi Hendrix, had an immense impact on black artists, he failed to gain traction in the black mainstream. But many black artists sparked their careers doing covers of Dylan songs, including soul artists such as Sam Cooke, Stevie Wonder, the Staple Singers, Bobby Womack, and the Isley Brothers. By the end of the 1960s and the start of the 1970s, the entirety of America’s musical traditions were up for grabs, in flux, and open to anyone with the courage and foresight to manipulate them. Blues, gospel, jazz, show tunes, soul, rock, funk, everything was undergoing change, and the black revolution was a primary source for the upheaval in the music.
One of the final events that the Lumpen performed as a group was an appearance at San Quentin Prison in May 1971, along with Curtis May-field and the guest of honor that day, Muhammad Ali. A prisoners’ organization within the federal prison had put together what was called “Soul Day at San Quentin,” and with the help of the newly formed San Quentin chapter of the Black Panther Party, the daylong event was a success. With speeches, dancers, and songs, the spirit was understandably lively, and the setting was rich in cultural symbolism and solidarity with the black movement. The San Quentin chapter of the Black Panther Party appropriated the populist Soul Day at San Quentin that was approved by the prison officials and transformed it into a tribute to Malcolm X, renaming the event “Malcolm X Day at San Quentin.”
Some Panther women had formed a dance troupe that performed with the Freedom Messengers, the backing band to Lumpen, to entertain the inmates. Prison officials and a local radio host brought in to coordinate the event were adamant about preventing a performance by the Lumpen—the band followed the dancers’ performance and only managed to get through a portion of one song before they were hastily removed from the stage by prison officials. William Calhoun recalls the events of that day:
Curtis Mayfield was there, Muhammad Ali was there, we were there, and believe me they didn’t know we were coming. They cut us off almost as soon as we got started. They didn’t know who we were. We were there, at any rate. And I did get a chance to tell him [Curtis Mayfield] what I had done. Him and Ali were the stars of the day. It was the only time I met Muhammad. He was incredible, just incredible. Curtis was … very open, very giving, very generous with us, or at least with me, and what we were trying to accomplish.47
For Calhoun to recount that Curtis Mayfield empathized with the radicalization of his work explains a great deal about the depths of respect Mayfield had for the black radical community. Mayfield sought to make protest music in the context of his own values and traditions, yet he was clearly in solidarity with the struggles of the Black Panther Party at the time. Ali was in a similar situation. Ali was considered the people’s champion, based upon his conversion to Islam, his prior relationship with Malcolm X, and his steadfast refusal to serve in Vietnam. “Ali was the initiator of black consciousness for us,” Mumia Abu-Jamal explained in the documentary Long Distance Revolutionary. Ali was an icon of black pride as an athlete, and was an articulate and uncompromising leader of an entire cultural movement of black consciousness and resistance.48
That day at San Quentin was symbolic of the overall disruption that the Lumpen caused upon the premises and the paradigms of black music at the time. The Lumpen had asserted themselves directly into the revolution in music and culture that was taking place in their community. Just as Soul Day represented an evolution of the prison reform movement, the Lumpen represented the latest transformation of the rich traditions of black protest music.
The enjoyment of that day would be short-lived. The San Quentin chapter of the Black Panther Party was created by George Jackson with a vision of organizing the entire US black prison population. Only three months later, George Jackson would be gunned down by prison guards. Two weeks after Jackson’s death, prisoners in Attica State Prison in upstate New York staged a high-profile takeover of the institution, which captured the attention of the nation and exposed the humanity of those imprisoned and the brutality of the US prison system. The brutality was further exposed when state troopers raided the prison and shot and tortured the surviving prisoners in the process of retaking the institution.
In a way, the collision of culture and politics that took place that day at San Quentin was inevitable. The soul revolution and the black revolution were taking place together. An explosion of soul music has the ability to destroy boundaries imposed on the psyche by Western civilization. Soul Day was an attempt to provide popular entertainment for the prison population, but it was politicized by the prisoners themselves. Who is to say what the “Power of Soul” may have done to “liberate” those in the yard that day?