Change Is Gonna Come: Music, Race And The Soul Of America

Craig Werner

Description

A Change is Gonna Come chronicles more than forty years of black music: from the hopeful, angry refrains of the Freedom movement to the slick pop of Motown; from Woodstock and the 'Summer of Love' to Vietnam and the race riots; from disco inferno to the Million Man March. This is an insightful and riveting study which looks at the place black music occupies in social history, its battle for the desegregation of popular music and its contribution to social change outside the recording studio

Sujets

• USA
• United States of America
• Popular music
• Ethnic studies
• 20th century
• États-Unis

Informations

• Publié par: Canongate Books
• Date de parution: 31 juillet 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781782115816
• Langue: English

Extrait

CRAIG WERNER is a professor of Afro-American Studies at the University of Wisconsin, where he teaches courses on Black Music and American Cultural History. He is the recipient of the Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching. He lives in Madison, Wisconsin.
A Change
Is Gonna Come
MUSIC, RACE & THE SOUL OF AMERICA
Craig Werner
CANONGATE
Published in the US by Plume, a member of Penguin Putnam Inc.
First published in Great Britain in 2000 by Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE
This edition published in 2014 by Canongate Books
Copyright © 1998, Craig Werner The moral rights of the author have been asserted
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 84195 296 3
www.canongate.tv
For Geoff, Tim and the Students of Afro 156
Contents Introduction: “What’s Going On” Acknowledgments
  Section One: “A Change Is Gonna Come”: Mahalia Jackson, Motown, and the Movement 1. The Dream 2. Mahalia and the Movement 3. “The Soul of the Movement”: Calls and Responses 4. Motown: Money, Magic, and the Mask 5. The Big Chill vs. Cooley High: Two out of Three Falls for the Soul of Motown
  The Gospel Impulse 6. Sam Cooke and the Voice of Change 7. Solid Gold Coffins: Phil Spector and the Girl Group Blues 8. SAR and the Ambiguity of Integration 9. “The Times They Are A-Changin’ ”: Port Huron and the Folk Revival 10. Woody and Race 11. “Blowin’ in the Wind”: Politics and Authenticity 12. Music and the Truth: The Birth of Southern Soul 13. Down at the Crossroads
  The Blues Impulse 14. Soul Food: The Mid-South Mix 15. Dylan, the Brits, and Blue-Eyed Soul 16. The Minstrel Blues 17. Otis, Jimi, and the Summer of Love: From Monterey to Woodstock 18. Last Thoughts on the Dream: Dot and Diana
  Section Two: “Love or Confusion?”: Black Power, Vietnam, and the Death of the Dream 19. Sly in the Smoke 20. Death Warrants: LBJ, Martin, and the Liberal Collapse 21. “All Along the Watchtower”: Jimi Hendrix and the Sound of Vietnam 22. ‘Retha, Rap, and Revolt 23. “Spirit in the Dark”: Aretha’s Gospel Politics 24. Jazz Warriors: Malcolm and Coltrane
  The Jazz Impulse 25. “Black Is an’ Black Ain’t”: JB, Miles, and Jimi 26. Curtis Mayfield’s Gospel Soul 27. John Fogerty and the Mythic South 28. “Trouble Comin’ Every Day”: Southern Strategies and the Revolution on TV 29. Troubled Souls: Wattstax and Motown (West) 30. “Where Is the Love?”: Donny Hathaway and the End of the Dream
  Section Three: “I Will Survive”: Disco, Irony, and the Sound of Resistance 31. Reflections in a Mirror Ball 32. Reverend Green and the Return of Jim Crow 33. Demographics 101: Hard Times in Chocolate City 34. Black Love in the Key of Life 35. Jimmy Carter and the Great Quota Disaster of 1978 36. Roots: The Messages in the Music 37. God Love Sex: Disco and the Gospel Impulse 38. Disco Sucks 39. Punks and Pretenders 40. Rebellion or Revolution: Bruce Springsteen and the Clash 41. P-Funkentelechy 42. Redemption Songs: Bob Marley in Babylon 43. The Message: Hip-hop and the South Bronx
  Section Four: “And That’s the Way That It Is”: The Reagan Rules, Hip-hop, and the Megastars 44. Welcome to the Terrordome 45. Springsteen and the Reagan Rules 46. The Problem of Healing in the Hall of Mirrors 47. The View from Black America 48. The Way It Was and the Way It Is 49. Brer Rabbit and Tar Baby 50. Run-D.M.C. Negotiates the Mainstream 51. “A Hero to Most”: Elvis in the Eighties 52. Megastardom and Its Discontents: Michael and Madonna 53. Duke Ellington for Our Time: The Symbol Fomerly Known as Prince 54. West Africa Is in the House 55. “Bring the Noise”: The New School Rap Game 56. “Know the Ledge”: KRS-One, Rakim, and the Gangstas 57. “Born in the U.S.A.”: Springsteen and Race
  Section Five: “Holler If Ya Hear Me”: In the Nineties Mix 58. Wasteland of the Free 59. American Dreaming 60. C.R.E.A.M., or, Tupac on Death Row 61. Deeper Shades of Soul 62. Ancestors and Elders 63. Conversations with the Ancestors 64. Flashes of the Spirit 65. Redemption Songs (The Nineties Remix)
 
  Notes Playlist Index
Introduction: “What’s Going On”
“When would the war stop? That’s what I wanted to know. . . the war inside my soul.” That was the question that inspired Marvin Gaye to create the great 1971 album that provides the title of this section. He could have been speaking for the country. On the cover of What’s Going On , Gaye gazed out over a nation torn by conflicts: the war in Vietnam and a racial war raging sometimes in the streets, but always in our hearts. Nearly three decades later, we’re still looking for answers to Gaye’s question. Voices of despair sometimes seem to have carried the day. Difference is real, they say; there’s no point in trying to change human nature. War, like the poor, will be with us always. That’s just the way it is.
They’re wrong.
A Change Is Gonna Come is my attempt to help renew a process of racial healing that at times seems to have stopped dead. Like Marvin Gaye, I believe that black music provides a clear vision of how we might begin to come to terms with the burdens of our shared history. During nearly two decades of conversations with students desperately seeking ways to make sense of their lives, I have found that black music and the not-quite-white music that responds to its calls can provide many with insight that allows healing to begin. It’s a wisdom grounded in process; it can’t be reduced to “Aretha’s Little Book of Life,” “The Wit and Wisdom of Miles Davis,” or “Ten Ways to Beat the Blues.” The best way to get a sense of what black music offers is to follow its story through the decades that have shaped the world we live in today.
History never happens in straight lines. The lines connecting events extend across space and time in tangled, irreducible patterns. All forms of storytelling oversimplify the patterns, but music simplifies less than most. Structurally, music mirrors the complications of history. Moving forward through time, music immerses us in a narrative flow, gives us a sense of how what happened yesterday shapes what’s happening now. But the simultaneous quality of music—its ability to make us aware of the many voices sounding at a single moment—adds another dimension to our sense of the world. When a jazz trumpeter incorporates a Louis Armstrong riff into her solo or a hip-hop DJ samples James Brown, music transcends time. When a London remix of a Jamaican version of a Curtis Mayfield classic plays in a Tokyo dance club, music conquers space. When “glory hallelujah” is the line that follows “Nobody knows the trouble I see,” and no one finds that confusing, music captures the paradoxes of the human heart.
A Change Is Gonna Come makes no attempt to tell a definitive story. Rather, I look at what’s happened in America since the fifties from as many angles as possible. At times, I stick close to the chronological sequence of events; at others, I deliberately create dialogues between songs released years apart. In all cases, my underlying intention is to suggest useful ways of thinking about the problems that keep America from realizing its own democratic ideals. There are no more compelling statements of human potential than the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. But, perhaps because the ideals are so visionary, there’s probably never been a nation that more consistently failed to live in accord with what it imagined itself to be.
Nowhere has that been clearer than in America’s experience with race. From the moment the first slave ship landed at Jamestown in 1619, America has struggled—sometimes heroically, sometimes evasively—with the reality of a multicultural society. The attempt to express the inner meaning of that struggle gives American art its unique power. You can feel it in the novels of Mark Twain and Ralph Ellison, Herman Melville and William Faulkner, Toni Morrison and Leslie Silko, in the collages of Romare Beardon and the photographs of Dorothea Lange. But its strongest expression comes in music. Since the barriers imposed by legal segregation began to come down after World War II, music has provided a unique forum for dialogue—sometimes harmonious, sometimes angry—between black and white voices.
The primary goal of A Change Is Gonna Come is to tell the story of that beautiful and complicated dialogue. It’s a story of how music radiates healing energies, how gospel and soul and reggae help us imagine a world where we can get along without turning off our minds. But it’s also a story about how history erodes hope, how the lures of money and power tempt us to betray our best selves. And how often we give in.
The music of the last four decades refuses to forget either part of the story. If we forget where we’ve come from, we have no chance of knowing who we really are, what we can become. Frequently the music tells a truer story than the ones recorded in the newspapers or broadcast on TV. Rapper Chuck D’s claim that “rap music is black America’s CNN” applies equally well to the gospel music that powered the freedom movement, the soul music that carried the message of love through the sixties, the funk, reggae, and disco that testify to the confused crosscurrents of the seventies.
It’s not just a black thing. A Change Is Gonna Come places black music at the center of the story for reasons that have a lot to do with history and nothing to do with the melanin content of an individual’s skin. Most of the people taken into slavery came from West African cultures that understood how developing individual character contributed to the health of the community. When West Africans confronted the nightmare realities of slavery, they improvised ways of surviving that have come down to us through the voices of Mahalia Jackson and Sam Cooke, the instruments of Jimi Hendrix and John Coltrane, and the communal explorations of Sly and the Family Stone and the Wu-Tang Clan. While those