Recently, while reading the fascinating oral history of ‘60s girl groups, ‘But Will You Love Me Tomorrow?’, I was quite taken by a brief chapter on The Shirelles concerning a monumental concert fundraiser in Alabama that has largely been forgotten. As the Summer heat bears down this Juneteenth, let’s take a look back at Salute to Freedom ’63 for this installment of Insist!

Birmingham, Alabama, August 5^th, 1963. In a city and time rife with tension and conflict, only two weeks from city segregation ordinances being repealed, and only months since the Birmingham Campaign for civil rights, the Salute to Freedom event was a major happening and endeavor. One of many events put on by national civil rights organizations as fundraisers for the upcoming March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, the Birmingham event was absurdly laden with talent and prominence. Martin Luther King, Jr (then head of SCLC) and James Baldwin were there, along with Joe Louis and Dick Gregory. And included on the musical slate, none other than Ray Charles, Nina Simone, Johnny Mathis, Clyde McPhatter, the Shirelles and Ella Fitzgerald (though it isn’t clear if she actually performed).

With an event of this stature, and with divisions in the area so stark, attendance and interest and scrutiny were sure to be high. Local press and authorities effectively ignored and stonewalled the event, while volunteers drummed up promotion and ticket sales. Initially planned for the large auditorium downtown, permission was denied at the last minute, forcing the event to be held five miles out of town on the football field at Miles College, on a makeshift stage. Only one major hotel would allow attendees as guests. Cab drivers refused service. Birmingham police wouldn’t work the show. Even still, the event was able to occur, on a 98 degree day, with upwards of 16,000 attending, many even walking miles with their own chairs.

Salute to Freedom ‘63 ran late into the evening, and at one point during Johnny Mathis’s performance, the rickety stage partially gave way, injuring several people onstage. The show carried on but the difficulties were far from over. The performers, who were traveling together on a chartered plan from New York, were delayed several hours returning due to a bomb threat at the airport. National press barely covered the event, with the old gray lady only running four lines about it, primarily concerning the stage collapse. Though never published, there are thankfully a few terrific photos courtesy of LIFE magazine: March on Washington: Rare Photos of a Star-Studded Fundraiser, 1963.

Just over three weeks later, on August 28^th, was the March on Washington. Then only a couple of weeks later, on September 15^th, Ku Klux Klan members bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, killing four young girls. John Coltrane composed his stunning ‘Alabama’ in response to the bombing. We’ll conclude this Insist post with a live clip of the tune:

“And my soul has been psychedelicized!”

If you’ve listened to Time Has Come Today, the 1967 hit by the Chambers Brothers, you have likely been psychedelicized. And possibly politicized too. 

You’ve probably heard at least parts of the iconic song in films and documentaries covering the music, culture, and civil rights struggles of the late 1960s. But if you haven’t listened to the full 11 minute LP version, I can’t recommend it enough. I remember the first time a friend played the track for me in a small, falling apart rental house in Boone when I was in school at Appalachian. It was unlike anything I’d heard before – the constant ticking of the cowbell mimicking a clock (rivaling any better known songs featuring cowbell, ahem),  the alternate speeding up and slowing down of the tempo, the steady bass/drum rhythm melding into an extended break of a hypnotic fuzz guitar solo punctuated by a repeated chorus of voices chanting “TIME!”, bouts of foreboding laughter, and wails of “Ahhhhhhhhhhh!” Yeah, this song is a whole mood, as they say. 

The Chambers Brothers were four brothers from a sharecropping family in Mississippi – George, Lester, Willie, and Joe– who sang in the fields together before forming as a gospel group at the Mount Calvary Baptist Church in 1954. They later joined up with English drummer Brian Keenan, making up one of the first interracial rock bands in the U.S. They’re often described as a psychedelic soul band that mixed gospel, blues, rock, funk, and R&B.

Time Has Come Today was written by Joe, the youngest of the four, after he sat in on a class with “hero of American consciousness” Timothy Leary; brother Willie later added the music and the psychedelicized line. The song was first released in 1966 as a single version coming in at just over two minutes but didn’t make a splash until it was re-recorded in 1967. Legend goes that producer David Rubinson rebelled against Columbia Records president Clive Davis’ explicit directive NOT to re-record the song and asked the band to come into the studio an hour early where they got the song down in just one take, resulting in the extended version that went to #11 on the Billboard Hot 100 for 5 weeks. Not only did the song serve as an introduction to psychedelic rock, it seemed to simultaneously comment on the upheaval and social unrest of the time and also foreshadow what was still to come. Without being too overtly political, it leaves a lot to the listeners’ interpretation: what has the time come for? Reflecting on the lyrics this Juneteenth, I like to consider what kind of expansive emancipation the brothers might have been calling for:

Time has come today
Young hearts can go their way
Can’t put it off another day
I don’t care what others say
They say we don’t listen anyway
Time has come today…

While we’re talking Chambers Brothers, make sure to check out two of their other notable albums. Love Peace and Happiness is a double LP combining studio material with a live show from Fillmore East. Released in 1970, the album features the truly excellent 16 minute side-filling song of the same name, also written by the brothers and produced by David Rubinson. Like Time, this song includes the brothers’ signature elements of psychedelic guitar, layered crescendo of voices, rhythmic cowbell clanging, and a plea for togetherness. Flip to the other side and take in their simultaneously rocking and plaintive version of Wade in the Water, as well as their soulful rendering of Curtis Mayfield’s iconic People Get Ready.

Finally, don’t sleep on the 1966 LP Barbara Dane and the Chambers Brothers for a politically charged collaboration with the singer and activist that mixes folk, gospel, and pop with bare instrumentation, harmonica, and hand clapping. The album opens strong with the brothers doo wop harmonizing along with Dane’s full-throated voice in It Isn’t Nice, a powerful anthem on civil disobedience written by Malvina Reyolds after she participated in the San Francisco Palace Hotel Sit-Ins: 

It isn’t nice to block the doorway
It isn’t nice to go to jail
There are nicer ways to do it
But the nice ways always fail
It isn’t nice, it isn’t nice
You told us once, you told us twice
But if that is freedom’s price
We don’t mind

We received this disc thanks to the Smithsonian Folkways Recordings nonprofit record label which makes custom copies from their collection along with original liner notes. All of these titles are available to check out from the Music Library in the Mary Duke Biddle Music Building so what are you waiting for? The time has come today!

Welcome back to another installment of Insist!

For this entry we’ll encounter two seminal American rock groups that were innovators, stalwarts, outsiders and disruptors of their respective scenes and eras.

First, to the Motor City, from which a trio of brothers calling themselves Death sprung in the early 70s. In a city of many musical innovations, both popular and proto, the brothers Hackney (Bobby, David and Dannis) and their power-trio hard-rock approach took their city’s sounds (like the Stooges and Alice Cooper) and propelled them even further and towards the coming punk revolution. The brothers played together in numerous groups before and after Death (including RockFire Funk Express, 4^th Movement and Lambs Bread) and only released one 45 in their initial span, receiving a major reintroduction in 2009 when the Drag City label reissued that 45 (with five other tracks from 1974 as ‘For the Whole World to See’). Other reissue recordings followed, along with a reformation of the group, spurring new releases and tours. Their story is best related in the terrific documentary, ‘A Band Called Death’, from 2013.

Fast forward a few years and travel over to Washington, DC where Bad Brains were stirring up their own hardcore punk racket, influencing countless groups in the process. Starting as a jazz fusion band called Mind Power, in 1976, the classic lineup of H.R., Dr. Know, Darryl Jenifer and Earl Hudson shifted to punk and proceeded to lay waste to the nation’s capitol before relocating to New York City in 1980. Their classic self-titled release from 1982 is one of the most legendary hardcore punk recordings ever, and the group continued mutating sound-wise throughout the ensuing years, incorporating heavy metal and funk and reggae (as already evidenced from a few tracks on their debut; all members are also Rastafarians). To experience their speed, fury, intensity, power and brilliance the best place to start is probably a clip of the song ‘Big Take Over’ from a 1982 show captured on video at CBGB.

And, for more Bad Brains footage, courtesy of a documentary about the Black experience in punk rock, check out ‘Afro-Punk’.

The links in this post may be considered indecent, obscene or offensive, listener discretion is advised.

Thanks Christina Manzella for the last Insist post all about Lizzo, that was great! For this latest post we turn our focus to the Smithsonian Anthology of Hip-Hop and Rap, a sprawling 9-CD and hardback book release that begins with the Fatback Band in 1979 and concludes with Drake in 2013. This massive set was being discussed and dissed extensively before it even became available. Everyone had canonical statements to make, omissions to argue, selections to challenge, and inclusions to debate, and the anthology serves as the jumping off point for this seventh post in the Insist series.

In the spirt of debate and alternate choices spurred by the box set itself, this post is about choosing representative artists from the anthology but presenting different songs to match with the theme of this blog series. There are myriad tracks and artists to choose from to fit this purpose, and I welcome any and all nit-picking about what could have been included. So, without further ado, here are three tracks not actually on the anthology but very much in the mode of Insist – Black Activist Voices in Music!

No strangers to controversy and militant political statements, Public Enemy ratcheted up their rage even higher with their fourth album ‘Apocalypse 91…the Enemy Strikes Black’. Almost any cut on the album could work for our purposes here but none hits quite as hard or mercilessly as ‘By the Time I Get to Arizona’.

Riffing on the name of the similarly titled Jimmy Webb tune (The definitive version of which was done by Isaac Hayes. Argue THAT!) and featuring a nasty and perfect sample of the Mandrill song ‘Two Sisters of Mystery’ by the Bomb Squad, the song pulls no punches in criticizing the decision of the Arizona (and New Hampshire) governor to rescind the Martin Luther King Jr holiday. And if the lyrics don’t get the point across then check out the video, in which Chuck D and the S1Ws are depicted murdering a senator and other white male politicians in Arizona. If you want more from these masters of political hip-hop then don’t miss both ‘Fear of a Black Planet’ and ‘It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold us Back’.

Mos Def and Slick Rick are both hip hop legends, and well represented on the box, but this oddball (maybe not that odd, as Mos Def and Talib Kweli did a version of Slick Rick’s ‘Children’s Story’ on their Black Star album) pairing from 2009 is on another level, both politically and sonically. Mos Def (now known as Yasiin Bey) released ‘The Ecstatic’ as somewhat of a comeback album and Slick Rick…..well, Slick Rick is easily one of the most singular and beloved rappers of all time. ‘Auditorium’ features an Eastern-tinged backing track by producer extraordinaire Madlib and a superbly poetic and conscious first verse from Mos Def. But then Slick Rick appears, and anyone expecting some La-di-da-di party rap is in for a surprise as instead “The Ruler” drops an amazing Iraq-war themed verse in which he inhabits a persona of himself as a US solider on a 15-month tour of duty. Encountering a “young Iraqi kid” carrying laundry, the narrator asks what’s wrong and if he’s hungry and the reply is  “No, gimme my oil or get the [f*ck] out my country”. It is a disorienting, succinct and real-time commentary on the folly and destruction of the war and the effects on both Iraqis and the invading soldiers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nx1_yzq9cX4

No other modern hip-hop group is so consistently and unrelentingly political as Dead Prez (okay, sure, The Coup takes that crown) and one of their toughest tracks is ‘Police State’ from their 2000 debut ‘Let’s Get Free’. There’s no shortage of police commentary content to choose from (for starters see the anthology-included ‘Fuk Tha Police’ by NWA or KRS-One’s ‘Sound of da Police’), and this indictment starts with the police but goes way beyond to advocate for socialism and revolution. With vocal sample bookends, by Omali Yeshitela (founder of the Uhuru movement) at the beginning and Fred Hampton and an unknown speaker at the end, the duo of Stic.man and M-1 leave no doubts about the injustices they see and where they stand: “I throw a Molotov cocktail at the precinct, You know how we think”.

I was so pleased when Bill and Stephen began this series, and I especially enjoyed reading about one of my all-time favorite artists, Nina Simone. Music frequently serves as a source of inspiration for listeners. It can bring people together around a common cause. At times though, and sometimes more important than this call to action, music can serve as a much-needed source of comfort. Therefore, I asked if I could contribute a post focused not only on activism in the traditional, outwardly-directed sense, but also on what I think of as activism on a more personal level. To that end, when I think of music centered on knowing one’s worth and demanding respect from others, one artist inevitably comes to mind, and that artist is Lizzo.

Years before she garnered mainstream success, Lizzo released her debut Lizzobangers. Songs like “Be Still” and “T-Baby” (short for tar baby) reference the difficulties she faced in those early years trying to make it as an artist, namely her experiences with houselessness and food insecurity. Numerous tracks speak to the experience of living in a world that devalues blackness, women, and bodies that have never been and will never be a sample size. These themes continue in Lizzo’s second studio album, Big Grrrl Small World. From the opening song “Ain’t I,” a reference to a speech by the abolitionist Sojourner Truth, to the penultimate track “My Skin,” Lizzo reveals to us her confidence while also highlighting the long journey it takes for so many of us to overcome self-doubt. The world does not often know how to handle such brazen self-assuredness from a bigger-bodied black woman, and, luckily for her listeners, Lizzo could not care less.*

 The final album I want to address in this post is my personal favorite, her 2016 EP Coconut Oil. While her earlier and, tragically, lesser-known music spoke of struggle—both personal and more broadly—this six-track EP exudes joy in its reminder to take care of ourselves. In “Scuse Me” and “Coconut Oil,” we find self-love anthems. With lyrics like “I don’t need a crown to know that I’m a queen” in the former and “Don’t worry ’bout the small things, I know I can do all things” in the latter, Lizzo exudes a sort of self-assuredness toward which we all strive. Furthermore, she stresses that, if we can love ourselves, then we know just how deserving of others’ love we are, as illustrated in the lyrics of “Worship” and her first big single, “Good as Hell.” Activism, whether it entails fighting for the collective or for oneself, is exhausting. This EP provides us with that brief break necessary to avoid burnout and to practice a little self-care.

Of course, if you are completely unfamiliar with Lizzo, go ahead and start with her most recent album Cuz I Love You, which you can borrow from the Music Library here. Do yourself a favor though, and go back and stream all her earlier releases.

*I wanted to include an addendum after the online bullying that occurred in response to the release of Lizzo’s most recent music video. In stating that the singer “could not care less,” I am in no way implying that she is unfazed by the racist and fatphobic comments she receives online and in the media. The confidence that Lizzo displays in her lyrics and her media presence is something to which so many of us aspire, and I hope this post illustrates my gratitude to her for that.

Thanks for the prompt, Bill. I’m pleased to spring forth from the mighty Nina Simone and bring this to the present day with a spotlight on the Chicago-based composer, clarinetist, keyboardist, bandleader and vocalist Angel Bat Dawid. Part of the International Anthem record label’s roster, and truly a force to be reckoned with, she and her band Tha Brothahood sit at the nexus of modern free and spiritual jazz, unfurling cosmic waves of righteous beauty and anger and passion. And of all her releases thus far, the best demonstration of her craft and insistence can be found on the 2020 release ‘Live’.

Recorded primarily at JazzFest Berlin in 2019, the festival and experience of being in Germany presented her and the band with a series of stressors and slights that very much played out in the band’s confrontational performance that November night. The recording is also bookended with field recordings (set to music) of her giving a hotel staffer the what-for and of comments from her appearance on a panel discussion during the festival.

This is a truly transcendent and fiery recording, and there might be no better current embodiment of the purpose of this blog series than ‘Live’. This post will remain short so you, dear reader, can listen to Angel Bat Dawid’s sounds and read her in her own words.

Find the entire release, with extensive notes and commentary from Angel Bat Dawid, on Bandcamp.

Or borrow the CD, available at the Music Library.

Until next time…

Stephen, thanks for a solid post on Eugene McDaniels. I knew the Les McCann version of “Compared to What”, but that was the extent of my awareness of his work. “Supermarket Blues” sure packs a wallop of defiance embedded in a tight groove that can propel a person through even the most tedious Excel spreadsheets at speed.

I do have to respond to one assertion in your piece though: while I can’t deny that McDaniels wields the word with the skill of a master knife-fighter, the defining “goddam” of the Civil Rights era does in fact belong to Nina Simone.

We’ve been wanting to get to “Mississippi Goddam” since we started this series, but truthfully its centrality to the concept of Antiracist protest in musical performance makes it hard to do it justice with the brevity we’re trying to bring to these posts.

Reportedly written in an hour in response to the murders of Medgar Evers and Emmett Till in Mississippi, as well as the 1963 Birmingham Church Bombing in Alabama, Mississippi Goddam cloaks seething outrage in a boppy little piano ditty that would be at home in any Broadway revue of the time. Simone seems to acknowledge this to her Carnegie Hall audience in the live recording from 1964 as she asserts, “This is a show tune, but the show hasn’t been written for it yet.” (While one can hear this plainly in the recording, we pull the quote from this excellent article by Malik Gaines in which he contextualizes Simone’s work: Simone’s body of recorded music reveals an anti-racist agenda enacted through performance. Simone used African-American musical, textual, and theatrical strategies, elaborating a history in which blacks have transformed the locations of marginality and exclusion into improvised positions from which to speak.)

However bouncy the tune, the lyrics do not pull any punches. Its opening stanzas make explicit the rage felt by people of color on a daily basis:

Alabama’s gotten me so upset
Tennessee made me lose my rest
And everybody knows about Mississippi Goddam

And later:

Hound dogs on my trail
School children sitting in jail

Black cat cross my path
I think every day’s gonna be my last

Lord have mercy on this land of mine
We all gonna get it in due time
I don’t belong here
I don’t belong there
I’ve even stopped believing in prayer

“Mississippi Goddam” nearly instantly became an anthem of the Civil Rights era, despite many radio stations (mostly in the south) refusing to play the song. In fact, as reported both in this Atlantic article and in an interesting Netflix documentary (streaming or at Lilly on DVD), most southern stations returned promotional packages with copies of the record snapped in half. It was an audience favorite in live performances, and Simone played it as a closing number in many of her concerts throughout the Sixties.

While browsing the web looking for a clip of the original release of the song (embedded above), I ran across this live recording from ’65 in Antibes. I was struck by what came across as Simone’s bone-deep fatigue as she turned in what was nonetheless an electrifying performance. How wearying it must have been to have been giving your all in so many performances of such a song, knowing that white audiences likely were listening but not hearing.

I guess I point this out as a way of saying that I hope we’re living up to our responsibility to practice a new kind of listening now at DUL.

…

So, speaking of the “now”, Stephen – we’ve spent some time on the history of Antiracism in music (and we’re far from done with that), but do you want to take us into the present day for a glimpse of Black Activism in the current music scene?