Songs of My Soul: Healing and the Black Music Tradition
Songs of My Soul: Healing and the Black music tradition
By Kizzy Joseph
Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Bachelor of the Arts in the American Studies Program Middlebury College
May 7, 2018
I have neither given nor received unauthorized aid on this assignment.
1
The Gift to Sing Who Can Be Born Black?
James Weldon Johnson (1917) Mari Evans (1970)
Sometimes the mist overhangs my path, Who And blackening clouds about me cling; can be born black But, oh, I have a magic way and not To turn the gloom to cheerful day — sing I softly sing. the wonder of it the joy And if the way grows darker still, the Shadowed by Sorrow's somber wing, challenge With glad defiance in my throat, I pierce the darkness with a note, And/to come together And sing, and sing. in a coming togetherness vibrating with the fires of pure knowing I brood not over the broken past, reeling with power Nor dread whatever time may bring; ringing with the sound above sound above sound No nights are dark, no days are long, to explode/in the majesty of our oneness While in my heart there swells a song, our comingtogether And I can sing. in a comingtogetherness
Who can be born black and not exult!
2 Introduction
I have always felt this deep love and connectedness to Black music. I remember spending the mornings in the green 1995 Mercury Villager my father drove on the way to school, listening to the “old school” tunes (what I categorize as mid-to-late twentieth century Black music) on
WRKS 98.7FM,1 commonly known as Kiss FM by its most beloved listeners. I was a shy, insecure, early adolescent Black girl transitioning into middle school and grappling with puberty.
I was accustomed to suppressing my feelings and emotions, lacking the agency to speak up and stand up for myself. It is only now I realize it was the Black music I listened to on Kiss FM
(from Motown to funk to golden age hip-hop) that spoke for me, that spoke to me, that helped make sense of my hardships.
There is immense beauty, power, and strength in Black music, in its polyrhythms, bass, call-and-responses, and ranging timbres. Hearing Stevie Wonder’s vibrant, youthful tenor voice on the radio always filled me with great joy as he assured me “Don’t you worry ‘bout a thing, sugar.”2 I imagined what it felt like to be in love, my heart melting as I listened to “Could It Be
I’m Falling In Love” by The Spinners. Sly and the Family Stone’s upbeat, funky child-like melody “Everyday People” always put a smile on my face, alleviating my doubts, sadness, and insecurities.
What makes Black music Black music? How is it that its many genres all seem to have a core healing force and power? It is this somewhat indescribable force and power that attracts and intrigues me – what many Black people have collectively referred to as soul. Soul, a term
1 A Black-owned, New York City-based radio station founded in 1981. It was bought out by ESPN in 2012 and is now a sports broadcasting station called WEPN-FM. 2 Lyric from “Don’t You Worry ‘bout a Thing,” a song on his 1973 album Innervisions.
3 popularized at the height of the Black Power movement of the 1960s and 70s, permeates all aspects of Black life: “soul food,” “soul sista,” “soul brotha.”3 It is my fascination with Black music and evolving interest in New Age spirituality that has inspired me to explore the ineffable, philosophical nature of soul in relation to music, using Black existential philosophy as a theoretical framework by examining this overarching question: How do Black people make meaning of their existence beyond oppression via soul music? I include “beyond oppression” because I want to stress that:
1) while there is no singular Black experience (as other intersecting identities such as gender, sexuality, class, etc shape and impact one’s lived experiences), what concretizes the Black experience is its roots in the “legacy of struggle”4 – the racist, anti-Black institutions and practices (i.e. police brutality and colorism) that continue to oppress Black people all across the world, thus binding them together as a collective; and most importantly,
2) reducing Blackness to mere racialized pain, suffering, and oppression dehumanizes and diminishes the nuanced aspects of our [Black people] lived experiences. I assert “beyond oppression” to emphasize that the Black experience is more than pain, that we are more than our pain. “Beyond oppression,” then, goes beyond discourses of oppression and victimhood. So how do Black people make meaning of their existence beyond oppression via soul music? The simplified answer is through the contemplation and exploration of one’s self, relationship to others and world that enables one to find healing within the metaphysical abode that is soul. I define healing as a process in which one acknowledges pain and strive towards alleviating and transcending that pain in order to restore and affirm the wholeness of self, as well to foster the growth and development of self. Healing materializes in many forms, whether it is through temporary cathartic release from emotional expression, or a belief in the “more than,” a concept
3 Joel Rudinow, Soul Music: Tracking the Spiritual Roots of Pop from Plato to Midtown (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013): 10. 4 “Legacy of struggle” is a term coined by Black feminist scholar Patricia Hill Collins in Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (1990; reis., New York: Routledge, 2000):12.
4 that will be explained further in this section. This contemplation and exploration is translated through a tangible, communicative and expressive outlet. To clarify, there are many outlets through which Black people express the contents of their soul – literature or fashion, for instance. However, the outlet of focus for this thesis is music. Aside from my fondness for Black music, I decided to study music because of its significance, as one of the few (and arguably, the earliest) modes of self- expression and communication for Black people in the United States. Legally prohibited from learning to read and write (and violently reprimanded if caught doing so), early expressive culture for many enslaved Black people became passionate melodies, percussive movements and other types of engaging solo and communal performances that would lay the foundation for Black music in America.5 Moreover, music helped construct a collective Black identity, consciousness, and sense of solidarity. Furthermore, while soul manifests in various forms across different Black musical genres, I center my thesis specifically on American soul music of the 1960s and 70s in order to understand soul at a period when the word soul and label soul music were officially etched in the Black cultural lexicon and came into usage in popular culture.
Different questions guide each chapter: 1) “What are interpretations of the soul and how can we racialize the soul using a Black existential framework to understand the Black experience?”; 2) “How has music served as a healing tool for the Black individual operating in an anti-Black society?”; and 3) “How does 1960s and 70s American soul music explore notions of healing for the Black soul?”
5 Lawrence Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977): 6.
5 Overview
In Chapter one, I briefly investigate philosophical and theological interpretations of the soul. How have scholars theorized the soul? What are its components, its function, purpose(s)?
Because I want to grasp a comprehensive understanding of the soul, I have organized an inclusive archive, pulling from both Eastern and Western texts that discuss the concept of the soul. While I briefly present various conceptions of soul (ranging from Muslim philosopher al-Kindi’s interpretation in his treatise That There Exist Substances Without Bodies (circa 9th century) to
German philosopher G.W.F Hegel’s understanding of the soul in The Phenomenology of the Spirit
(1807), the main focus of this chapter is racializing the concept of the soul and Hegel’s concept of aufheben, grounding it in lived experiences. I do this by utilizing Black existential philosophy as a theoretical framework to understand the relationship between Black American identity and the soul.6
The term that I will use in my work is soul, and the basis of my definition for soul is the distinction I draw between the soul and soul. The soul is a concept deriving from the broad, generalized interpretations of philosophical and theological texts such as those I examine in this chapter – texts that do not address the concept of the soul in relation to identity markers such as age, race, and class, or situate it in a material, temporal context. The soul is related to an essence of being and existence theoretically applicable to anyone, void of identity restrictions. On the other hand, soul is inherently Black. Everyone, regardless of identity markers, can potentially have
(based on one’s spiritual/philosophical beliefs) a [the] soul but not everyone has soul. Soul is a racialized spiritual essence tied to the Black experience in the United States that serves as a
6 For now, I will loosely define Black existential philosophy as an Afro-centric existential philosophy.
6 metaphysical abode.7 A synonym or interchangeable term I use for soul is Black soul, which again emphasizes this distinction.
I argue that through material expressions of soul the Black individual is able to engage in the healing experience. Aufheben describes the contradictory nature of abolishing and preserving something at the same time, and the dilemma the conflict between these two forces creates: an attempt to self-overcome or point beyond, which is what I link to the notion I call “more than.” The
“more than” is a state of being/life/realm/existence/purpose beyond anti-Black oppression. I contextualize aufheben as the attempt by Black people to eliminate racial pain and trauma, but preserve or hold onto Blackness as a racial identity through envisioning the “more than” via an expression of soul. Aufheben and the conceptualization of the “more than” are aspects of the healing experience for Black people. The healing experience starts with the search within Black soul and it is this search within that is translated through expressive outlets such as music. Thus,
Black American music can be understood as a material expression of soul that also serves as a healing mechanism.8
In Chapter two, I give a brief historical overview of the phenomenon that gave birth to a collective Black American consciousness and identity: chattel slavery in the United States. It was through the shared experiences in navigating this oppressive structure that enslaved Africans were able to integrate West African and Euro-American cultural traditions to form a unique Black
American culture. I discuss how the inheritance of West African musical elements such as call and response led to the creation of Black American music, more specifically, spirituals. Not only do I argue that soul as a signifier of Black identity manifests in this time period, but that it also serves as
7 Soul can be considered a metaphysical abode in that it is a metaphysical “place” Black people “escape” from the struggles living in an oppressive, material world. 8 I use “materially,” viewing music as an “object” of expressive culture.
7 a “life force” that encouraged enslaved Black people to keep going, whether that simply meant getting through a hard day’s work or having faith and courage in the “more than,” which in the context of spirituals, meant heaven. I explore more in-depth how spirituals helped defined what healing meant for enslaved Black people and how they engaged in the healing experience via the singing and performance of spirituals. I explicitly make the connection between healing and notions of freedom, liberation, and transcendence, arguing that music offers the possibility for
Black people to experience a type of emotional, psychological and physical freedom/liberation/transcendence, even in the context of a seemingly permanent legacy of struggle at the material level.
The various forms of anti-Black oppression such as chattel slavery or segregation that constitute the legacy of struggle have had a deep and lasting impact on the Black body and psyche.
The emotional, psychological, and physical pain and trauma is both individual, collective, and generational. Chapter three takes a look at other Black music genres that influenced soul music: the blues and gospel music. Soul music would borrow aesthetic elements from both genres (including spirituals), moreso from gospel performative aesthetics such as “shouting” and “catching the Holy
Ghost/Spirit.” Thus the genre is unique because it blends the sacred and secular. Additionally, soul music would also reshape and expand what healing meant for Black people, as the concept of soul became more prominent during the 1960s and 70s due to the commercialization of Black culture and the racial justice movements of the time, the Civil Rights Movement and Black Power
Movement. Soul music, in its exploration of social issues and love, reshaped healing as a process not rooted in redemption faith (as with spirituals and gospel music) and love for God, but rather, in a love for one’s Blackness, others, the community and world, as well as a better society. Soul becomes rearticulated as a merger between the spiritual and material (political), as a life force that
8 encourages the Black individual to heal, to keep striving for a “more than” that is a racially just and loving society. I apply this theory of soul to real world phenomena: American soul music of the
1960s and 70s, drawing on audio and audiovisual sources to examine how soul and healing are expressed lyrically and performatively. Some examples include James Brown’s 1964 performance of “Please Please Please” at the Teenage Awards Music International (TAMI) concert, Marvin
Gaye’s 1971 classic “What’s Going On,” and The Staple Singers’ 1972 hit “I’ll Take You There.”
I have selected these songs because they give insight to the various ways Black soul artists engage in the healing experience: implicitly and explicitly acknowledging pain and trauma, articulating their conceptualization of the “more than,” and the catharsis both the Black artist and listener feels.
Lastly, I have also included an appendix that provides additional information, more specifically YouTube audio and audiovisual examples for the elements of West African music mentioned in Chapter two, and the lyrics of the songs I analyze in Chapter three. The YouTube examples can be accessed on the “KJ Thesis Video Files” electronic file.
Literature on Soul
There is substantial literature on soul music and two works are especially germane to this work are Soul Music: Tracking the Spiritual Roots of Pop from Plato to Motown (2010), and
Sound of Soul: The Story of Black Music (1969). Soul Music was recently published by philosopher of music Joel Rudinow, who explores the link between notions of the soul in relation to Black music and spirituality, arguing that the soul is “the locus of awareness and the voluntary agent in myself and other sentient beings.”9 Despite our agreement that the soul is a spiritual entity and not a physical one, Rudinow’s understanding is solely based on Western philosophical interpretations
9 Rudinow, Soul Music, 24
9 of the soul, lacking inclusion of Black scholarly interpretations – something I intentionally sought to intervene in, as I want to examine a wide range of perspectives. My thesis offers unique insights that centers Afrocentric thought, using Black existential philosophy as a theoretical framework.10
Nevertheless, Rudinow contributes a valuable perspective in the discourse on soul in relation to
Black music and the Black experience, especially as he questions whether soul can be translated by white people through music, and explores non-Black people’s engagement with soul music – interesting points of discussion that I do not have the time or space to touch upon in my thesis.
Another important component of Rudinow’s argument is that while soul music can be a healing tool (such as through holistic clinical practices like music therapy), it can also have negative effects. He introduces the concept of the dichotomy of good and evil within soul, explaining how soul artists have utilized music as an instrument of torture (i.e. “selling your soul to the devil”). I do not completely agree with this aspect of his argument and am open to challenging it – yet,
Rudinow’s work remains compelling, as he provides stimulating interpretations as a non-Black person on a phenomenon (soul) that I believe is inherently Black.
Phyl Garland’s Sound of Soul: The Story of Black Music (1969) is one of the earliest books written on soul music, first published in 1969 – the period marking the rise and popularity of soul music in American popular culture. Garland asks readers, “How deeply has soul music penetrated the cultural core of modern America and how did it all come about?”11 She provides a historical overview of the origins of American Black music, highlighting the blues and jazz to then provide context for the development and rise of soul music. What is unique about this text is not only
10 Molefi Kete Sante, Afrocentricity: The Theory of Social Change (1980; reis., Chicago: African American Images, 2003). 11 Phyl Garland, The Sound of Soul: The Story of Black Music (Chicago: NTC/Contemporary Publishing, 1969): i.
10 Garland’s writing on soul music at the time of it becoming mainstream, but also that her knowledge is grounded is her work as a Black music critic and journalist for the African-American marketed magazine Ebony. Garland interviews B.B. King, Nina Simone, and Aretha Franklin, influential artists who helped shape and popularize soul music. Like Rudinow, she explores non-
Black people’s engagement with soul music, and heavily critiques the appropriation of early 1950s and 60s rhythm and blues music by white artists through the circulation and sale of cover records.
Garland, like many Black scholars who have written about soul music, argues that soul is
“indisputably black” and that soul music is the “aesthetic property” of Black people.12
While academic texts such as those of Rudinow, Garland and others provide interesting insights on soul music, these works are fixated on tangible aspects and interpretations of soul in relation to Blackness and Black music: soul as a social identity, as a tool for political mobilization, as a cultural aesthetic, and its commodification within popular culture and the music industry. But what about the relationship between these expressions of soul and healing? My thesis focuses solely, and extensively on the ontological nature of soul and its capability of engaging the Black self in a healing from racial pain and trauma via music.
This work is truly meaningful to me, as it not only weaves together elements of my identity
(my love and connectedness to Black music, New Age spirituality-based outlook on life, and
Blackness), but it also propels me to reflect on my Black experience – my experience with racism, how I cope and heal with those circumstances, and what the “more than” means to me. Therefore, this thesis is partly a personal reflection, a way of making meaning of my own existence, finding purpose. Discourses on the Black experience can at times be too fixated on pain, and Blackness is more than pain. Through my thesis, I want to emphasize that the discourse on healing is just as
12 Garland, The Sound of Soul, 2, i.
11 important – in fact, even moreso because healing is necessary for the liberation of Black people, that is transcending discourses that limit Blackness as an identity rooted in struggle and pain.
Healing for Black people is resisting these discourses, going above and beyond, finding beauty in the experience of a people unified in the name of resilience.
12 Chapter One
soul \sōl\ n. : the immaterial essence, animating principal, or actuating cause of an individual life13
While some believe that the soul does not exist, those that do have attempted to parse its meaning on the spiritual, existential, ontological, etc levels. What is the soul? Is it an object, an aspect of subjective being, a spiritual entity, a corporeal feeling? How does one describe something so abstract as the soul?
One of the earliest concepts of the soul is Plato’s tripartite theory, developed in late 4th century BC. To Plato, the soul is an “immortal and imperishable”14 tripartite entity: reason (based in logic and truth), appetite (based in desire), and spirit (based in emotion).15 Reason rules the two other components, striving to keep them regulated and balanced in order to achieve harmony of the soul. Thus, the soul is the site of mental and psychological functions attributed to the unity of the human mind – distinct from the physical body.
Ninth-century Arab Muslim philosopher al-Kindi believed that the soul is “a divine, spiritual substance”16 and as further interpreted by scholar Maha el-Kaisy in The Biographical
Encyclopedia of Islamic Philosophy (2006), al-Kindi thought “though [the soul] exists in the body, [it] does not merge with it but rather uses it as its instrument and its window to the material world. The body is considered as its prison; the earthly world is only a bridge which the soul uses
13 Merriam-Webster, “Soul,” Def. 1. Merriam-Webster Dictionary, https://www.merriam- webster.com/dictionary/soul (accessed November 1, 2017). 14 Plato, H. N. Fowler, et al. Plato in Twelve Volumes: Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Phaedo, Phaedrus (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), 106. 15 Respectively known as logos, thymos, eros 16 Known as the “philosopher of the Arabs” and “father of Arab philosophy,” al-Kindi was an Arab Muslim philosopher, mathematician, among other professions; Peter Adamson, Great Medieval Thinkers: Al-Kindī (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 173.
13 to reach its ultimate hope of being near to its creator.”17 Like Plato, al-Kindi believed the soul is both structural and metaphysical, having both rational and non-rational aspects.
German philosopher G.W.F Hegel, whose work will be examined more in-depth in
Chapter Two, explains that the soul is a form of spirit, geist.18 Unlike Plato and al-Kindi, Hegel believed that the soul is embodied – in other words, that the human body is the abode of the soul.
Body and soul are unified. The soul is also tripartite for Hegel: the natural (“the immediacy of the
(human) soul”)19, feeling (the interior of the human soul), and actual (the exterior of the human soul – synthesis of the feeling and natural).
The soul, or atman, in Hinduism is much more abstract. It is "unborn, constant, eternal, primeval, this one / Is not slain when the body is slain."20 It is the internal essence that exists as the core of every being. Thus, the soul is the true nature of the self, of being – a (metaphysical) spiritual entity rather than a (physical) human being.
There are myriad ways to interpret the soul. These in particular present understandings that reflect both Eastern and Western schools of thought, intentionally moving away from a solely
Eurocentric philosophical focus. While my brief explanations of these concepts are simplified, it is interesting to notice that no matter how abstract or complex these theories are, they all share a core notion: that the soul is an intangible, metaphysical essence that is connected (even if loosely so) to
17 Oliver Leaman, ed. The Biographical Encyclopedia of Islamic Philosophy (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), 282. 18 Geist can be interpreted as “some sort of general consciousness, a single ‘mind’ common to all men.” Robert C. Solomon, “Hegel’s Concept of ‘Geist,’” Review of Metaphysics 23, no. 4 (1970): 642. 19 Klaus Brinkmann, “The Natural and the Supernatural in Human Nature: Hegel on the Soul,” Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science 195 (1998): 10. 20 Katha Upanishad, 2.18
14 the corporeal, the human body – in other words, an extension of being and existence that links the corporeal to the metaphysical.
Al-Kindi and Hegel’s interpretations, while intriguing, are abstract, presented as universally applicable. But what could it mean to situate the soul in particular lived experiences and events? Racializing the soul is central to answering the questions I have posed. By doing so, we are better able to understand the relationship between the soul and Blackness: what soul means to Black people, how they find catharsis in soul and express it. In order to racialize the soul, it is necessary to find and utilize (or, even create) a framework that speaks to Blackness, that examines notions of being and existence in relation to Black identity – hence, an Afrocentric framework.21 A framework that fits best is Black existential philosophy, a branch of Africana philosophy that arose in the 1970s as inspired by the work of Black scholar William R. Jones, who “argued for a humanistic response to black suffering through facing the absurd as found in the thought of Albert Camus and dealing with the contradictions of theological beliefs pointed out by Jean-
Paul Sartre.”22
Black Existentialism
Black existential philosophy, a branch of Africana critical theory, addresses European existentialism’s, and philosophy’s at large, failure to acknowledge how social constructions (race, gender, sexuality, for instance) informs one’s evolving understanding of self and others. By generalizing human experiences, European existentialism “obfuscates…hegemonic efforts to treat
21 Stemming from the word Afrocentricity, a term coined by scholar Molefi Kete Asante ; Molefi Kete Sante, Afrocentricity: The Theory of Social Change (1980; reis., Chicago: African American Images, 2003). 22 Also known as Africana critical theory. Africana refers to the entire Black diaspora (Afro- Latinx, Afro-Caribbean, Afro-American, Afro-European, and African identity).
15 their experiences as universal and representative,” thus asserting whiteness/white identity as the norm.23 Black existentialism actively counters this, examining the oppressive systems and ideologies (ie. colonialism, racism) that enable the construction of Blackness and how those structures affect the lived experiences of one deemed as “Black.” It can be argued that we live in an anti-Black world as a result of these structures, and Blackness can be understood not only as an identity specific to persons who are of predominantly African descent, but also as an identity opposite of colonial whiteness – it is a sociopolitical identity “rooted in oppression and subjugation [and] one routed through shared histories of a struggle for political agency and equality.”24 It is through examining the contexts that construct Black identity that Black existential philosophy, then, can be understood as a framework through which Black individuals can approach a “philosophical way of seeing, acknowledging, and exploring their experiences and meaning making” in an anti-Black world.25 “Who am I? Am I who I say I am? Am I all ought to be?” These are questions of existence explored by Black literary existentialist writer
Frantz Fanon.26 Meanwhile, Frederick Douglass contemplates in his autobiography, “Why am I a slave? Why are some people slaves, and others masters? Was there ever a time when this was not so? How did the relation commence?”27 “How does it feel to be a problem?” W.E.B DuBois asks
23 George Yancy, Look, a White!: Philosophical Essays on Whiteness (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2012): 7. 24 Bethany Criss-June, “Rachel Dolezal and Defining Blackness,” Abernathy Magazine, https://abernathymagazine.com/rachel-dolezal-and-defining-blackness/ (accessed April 18, 2018) ; It is also important to acknowledge that notions of Blackness: 1) have changed overtime, and 2) are culturally specific, varying across different geographic regions. 25 Linwood G. Vereen, et al. “Black Existentialism: Extending the Discourse on Meaning and Existence,” Journal of Humanistic Counseling 56, no. 1 (2017): 73. 26 Franz Fanon, Black Skin, White masks (New York: Grove Press, 1967). Several other writers considered Black literary existentialists are W.E.B. DuBois, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and Toni Morrison. 27 Magnus O. Bassey. “What is Africana Critical Theory or Black Existential Philosophy,” Journal of Black Studies 37, no. 6 (2007): 926.
16 in The Souls of Black Folk.28 What is to be understood from Black life from everyday experiences? And more strikingly, as leading Black existential scholar Lewis Gordon asks,
“Why go on?”
Antiblack racism espouses a world that will ultimately be better off without blacks. Blacks, from such a standpoint, must provide justification for their continued presence. “Why go on?” There is, however, another dimension to this question. One, in the end, goes because one wants to, and in so doing seeks ground for having to go on, The wanting, however, signifies an intentional framework that has already militated against nihilism, for self-value also emerges from valuing one’s desire to bring meaning to one’s existence.29
These are the kinds of questions that Black existentialism poses in order to understand the Black experience, the Black individual, their relationship to self, others, and the world.
The framework, however, not only examines anti-Black oppression and its impact, but also ways in which the Black individual and collective can be empowered. It refutes the notion that Black people share the same lived experiences, acknowledging nuance and the “unique personhood of the Black individual and collective” as shaped by several other identity markers.30
Thus, Black existential philosophy urges for a self-defined Black identity, advocating the assertion and reclamation of agency, freedom, and humanity – all of which Black people are denied in an anti-Black world. In attempt to make meaning of existence in oppression, Black existential philosophy demonstrates that the collective Black experience is beyond a matter of struggle and suffering, but also “the emancipation of all Black people.”31 Thus, Black existentialism is a problem-solving and social justice-oriented framework that also explores questions such as: What gives Black people willpower, courage, and hope to survive? How does
28 W.E.B DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903; reis., New York: Bantam Classic, 2005): 1. 29 Lewis Gordon, Existentia Africana: Understanding Africana Existential Thought (New York: Routledge, 2000): 15. 30 Vereen et al., “Black Existentialism,” 75. 31 Ibid., 75.
17 one empower the self and the collective to assert agency and humanity in the quest for liberation?
Aufheben Meets Black Existentialism
In aufheben (loosely translated as “sublation” in English), a concept derived from
German philosopher G.W.F Hegel, “[t]he whole is an overcoming which preserves what it overcomes. Nothing is lost or destroyed but raised up and preserved as in a spiral…”32 The contradictory nature of abolishing and preserving something at the same time, and the dilemma the conflict between these two forces creates an attempt to self-overcome or point beyond, which is what I term the “more than.” To put it more simply, aufheben is the contradictory process of abolishing, preserving, and transcending.
I employ the concept of aufheben, racializing it in order to understand what healing for
Black people means through the lens of Black existentialism. Aufheben is the attempt to eliminate racial pain and trauma, but preserve or hold onto Blackness as a racial identity. The conflict underlies these questions: what is Blackness without suffering? What does transcending it, even if temporarily, look like? What does a world where Black people are liberated look like?
What does it feel like? The “more than” is a conceptualization of the response to these questions, an envisioning of a state of being/life/realm/existence/purpose that is beyond oppression – thus it is rooted, as with Black existential philosophy, in establishing that the Black experience is “more than” pain and suffering. If Black theology scholar James Cone asserts that the, “The black experience is existence in a system beyond white racism,” then the “more than” for some Black individuals would be an existence in a system beyond white racism. For Black Christians, for
32 Lloyd Spencer and Andrzej Krauze, Introducing Hegel: A Graphic Guide (London: Icon Books Ltd, 2011): 80-81.
18 instance, the “more than” could be heaven – an eternal realm where one finds peace, solace, and abundance.
It is this envisioning of a “more than” that enables one to transcend not only an anti-
Black world, but the misconception that one’s existence is bound to it. This is what healing is about – healing is acknowledging pain and working towards alleviating and transcending that pain in order to restore and affirm the wholeness of self, as well to foster the growth and development of self. Thus healing for Black folks is rooted in liberation and transcendence.33
The belief in the “more than,” rooted in hope and courage, is what drives the healing experience. While dismantling anti-Black oppression and white supremacy is a large-scale solution to healing for Black people, my thesis focuses on healing on a smaller-scale: healing as a contemplative experience and process. How does soul function in this process?
Soul Defined
Just as Black existentialism contextualizes [European] existentialism by racializing it, we can understand the use of the term “soul” as a way of racializing the soul: contextualizing the abstract definition of the soul in the ontological questions and themes Black existential philosophy addresses. What was abstract (the soul) materializes Black (soul).
There is little research on the etymology of “soul,” but scholars agree that the word arose in
Black lexicon during the 1960s and 1970s, at the height of Black nationalist, social activist, and cultural pride movements and expressions in the United States. Joel Rudinow explains in Soul
Music that, “The term became a potent signifier of solidarity within the African American
33 Restoring and affirming wholeness of the self for Black people can mean dismantling racist notions that claim Black people as property, subhuman, and second-class citizens.
19 community in the struggle for black power, and as such it was applied to all manner of cultural production and expression – from cuisine (soul food) to hairstyles (soul patch) and special recognition handshakes (soul brother).”34 “Soul” in Rudinow’s context represents a self-defined
Black cultural aesthetic (soul food, soul patch, etc) that to some extent, also becomes a marketing tool. Mark Anthony Neal in Soul-Babies: Black Popular Culture and the Post-Soul Aesthetic
(2002) further elaborates:
Soul has also been an aesthetic interconnected with the marketplace and the consumerist desires of black and white audiences alike. Despite the drive toward self-determination that the soul aesthetic encapsulated, it remained a project that essentialized black identity and culture for one consumer public demanding inclusion into the mainstream on its own terms (clearly a self-defined black identity was more likely to be achieved than secession from the Unites States), and another looking for non-threatening markers of difference, which could be consumed as a measurement of mainstream’s positive response to the former’s demands for inclusion.35
As Phyl Garland concurs, soul is a “connotation of social identity” whose “essence is indisputably black,” an inherently Black identity.36
Musicologist Johannes Riedel claimed that, “The association of soul with black identity is not a new idea. What is new [in the late 1960s-1970s] is the blossoming of soul into a widely shared sense of black identity,” with W.E.B DuBois’s 1903 Souls of Black Folk being one of the earliest to name this essence.37 DuBois articulates soul as “the spiritual world in which ten thousand thousand Americans live and strive.”38 Within the Black individual lies two souls: the
Black (“Negro”) soul and the American soul, divided as a result of “the color line” by which
Black Americans are excluded from (white) American society. This generates what DuBois calls
34 Rudinow, Soul Music, 10. 35 Mark Anthony Neal, Soul-Babies: Black Popular Culture and the Post-Soul Aesthetic (New York: Routledge, 2002): 7. 36 Garland, The Sound of Soul, 2, 9. 37 Johannes Riedel, Soul Music, Black and White: The Influence of Black music on the Churches (Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing House, 1975): 52-53. 38 DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk, xxxi.
20 a “double consciousness” – the dilemma that describes the Black individual viewing and understanding the self from their own perspective, but also from the perspective of white society.39 Soul, then, can be understood as a fundamental Black American phenomenon.
This thesis focuses on the Black soul, a synonym for soul. I will examine soul as a Black identity, aesthetic, and expression. But taking a step further from DuBois’s sociological analysis of soul, I would like to emphasize its ineffable, spiritual and metaphysical nature. Religion scholar Leonard E. Barrett in Soul-Force: African Heritage in Afro-American Religion (1974) claims that soul “conveys a potent and very special quality of feeling that is unknown to those who are not Black” and in fact, describes it as a force, merging the two words into “soul-force:”
“Soul-force” in “Black talk” describes that quality of life that has enabled Black people to survive the horrors of their “diaspora.” The experience of slavery, and its later repercussions still remain to be dealt with; and “Soul” signifies the moral and emotional fiber of the Black man that enables him to see his dilemmas clearly and at the same time encourages and sustains him in his struggles. “Force connotes strength, power, intense effort and a will to live. The combined words – “soul-force” – describe the racial inheritance of the New World African; it is that which characterizes his life-style, his world view and his endurance under conflict. It is his frame of reference vis-à-vis the wider world and his blueprint for the struggle from bondage to freedom…It derives its impetus from the ancestral heritage of Africa, its refinement from the bondage of slavery, and its continuing vitality from the conflict of the present…Soul is visceral rather than intellectual, irrational rather than rational; it is art rather logic.40
Soul in a spiritual/metaphysical context is an immaterial racialized essence specific to the
Black experience(s). It is an abode, a realm in which one contemplates and explores existential and ontological questions and themes regarding the corporeal (pain, trauma, etc in an oppressive reality) and the spiritual and metaphysical (searching for the “more than,” the path towards freedom, liberation, etc) – hence, a platform for both grounding and transcendence that provides space for the healing experience and aufheben in order to make meaning of an existence beyond oppression. Soul is a spirit, life-force and power embodied in Blackness that can be expressed
39 Ibid., 3. 40 Leonard E. Barrett, Soul-Force: African Heritage in Afro-American Religion (New York: Anchor Press, 1974):1-2.
21 via a material outlet: a political and cultural identity, and aesthetic expression, among others.
Thus, Black music can be understood as a conduit through which soul is expressed, as well as a healing mechanism that Black people find cathartic release in. It is soul via Black music that prods, insisting Black people to keep moving, to keep “going [on].”
22 Chapter Two
“Black soul is not learned; it comes from the totality of black experience, the experience of carving out an existence in a society that says you do not belong” – James Cone41
W.E.B DuBois described music as, “the singular spiritual heritage of the nation and the greatest gift of the Negro people.”42 It would be the innovative musical contributions of Black people in America that would lay the foundation for popular American music genres known and widely appreciated today, from country and bebop, to gospel, house and rhythm and blues. These contributions, however, cannot be viewed as merely rooted in an American context. While the myth persists that the cultural heritage of African people was completely stripped way once they entered the “New World” in bondage as subhuman property,43 Black music (and other aspects of
African American culture) is clear evidence of the contrary – Black music is a testimony to the survival and transformation of African cultural elements.44
Music in West African Culture(s)
Music was and is integral to pre-colonial West African culture(s), 45 as a primarily oral tradition encompassing almost every aspect of African life. Music scholar Agatha Onwuekwe states, “It is an essential expression of life beginning with gentle lullabies heard in infancy and continuing with the games of childhood and the songs and dances associated with adult responsibilities. Music accompanies and celebrates every rite of passage, birth, and christening,
41 James Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation, Special Edition (Ossining: Orbis Books, 2010), 26. 42 DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk, 251. 43 Stanley M. Elkins, Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976) 44 Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness, 4-5. 45 ‘s’ is in parentheses as an acknowledgement of the overall significance of music in Africa, but also the diversity of the African continent – music takes up various forms across the continent.
23 initiation into adulthood, and finally death and mourning.”46 Songs served to pass down folklore and spread current news. They also helped ward off evil spirits and honor good ones.47 Music was not limited to singing, but also includes dancing and instrumentation – two other vital components of West African musical traditions. As stated by musicologist Jean Ferris, “While there is considerable variety in music experience among African tribal cultures, most African music is sung, by solo or chorus, alone or accompanied by musical instruments or by simple clapping and other rhythmic body gestures. Singing is usually loud and enthusiastic, often with a strident quality of voice.”48 According to Onwuekwe, there are dances for presentation, participation, work, play, among others. Dances (which can be classified by age, gender, etc) initiated significant life-event ceremonies such as birthing, ancestral spirit communication, and rites of passage. Moreover, instruments such as drums did not only accompany ritual dances and ceremonies but more significantly, they also served as non-linguistic communication tools, signaling announcements, arrivals, warnings.49
Thus, music in Africa is not limited to entertainment. It is functional rather than merely aesthetic, permeating every aspect of life. Elaborating on this distinction, scholar-musicians
Francis Bebey and J.H. Kwabena Nketia respectively state:
The objective of African music is not necessarily to produce sounds agreeable to the ear, but to translate everyday experiences into living sound. In a musical environment whose constant purpose is to depict life,
46 Al Onwuekwe, “The Socio-Cultural Implications of African Music and Dance,” Creative Artist: A Journal of Theatre and Media Studies 3, no.1 (2009): 171. 47 Meki Nzwei, “The African Knowledge of Sickness,” Voices: A World Forum for Music Therapy 2, no. 2 (2002), https://voices.no/index.php/voices/article/view/85/67 (accessed April 28, 2018) 48 Jean Ferris, Music: The Art of Listening (London: Brown & Benchmark, 1995), 338. 49 Ushe Mike Ushe, “The talking drum: An inquiry into the reach of a traditional mode of communication,” International Journal of Educational Research and Development 1, no. 2 (2012): 112.
24 nature, or the supernatural, the musician wisely avoids using beauty as his or her criterion because no criterion could be more arbitrary.50
For the African [and by extension African American], the musical experience is by and large an emotional one: sounds, however beautiful, are meaningless if they do not offer this experience or contribute to the expressive quality of the performance.51
Agreed upon by most ethnomusicologists, some main, recurring elements of West
African music are: polyrhythm, call and response (also known as antiphony), vocalization, audience participation, and improvisation.52 Polyrhythm is the combination of two or more different rhythms playing simultaneously. Musicologist A.M. Jones expresses, “Rhythm is to the
African what harmony is to the Europeans and it is the complex interweaving of contrasting rhythmic patterns that he finds his greatest aesthetic satisfaction.”53 Call and response/antiphony is “a song structure or performance practice in which a singer or instrumentalist makes a musical statement that is answered by another soloist, instrumentalist, or group. The statement and answer sometimes overlap.”54 Vocalization is the use of one’s voice to produce sound. For instance, making the voice sound like an instrument or other sounds such as groaning or beatboxing. Audience participation is engagement between the performer and audience, such as hand-clapping or singing-along collectively. “J.H. Kwabena Nketia explains that the social values of African societies encourage this form of physical engagement because it inspires group interaction and it ‘intensifies one’s enjoyment of music through the feeling of increased involvement and the propulsion that articulating the beat by physical movement generates.’”55
50 Mellonee V. Burnim and Portia K. Maultsby, eds., African American Music: An Introduction, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2015), 8. 51 Ibid., 18. 52 See “Appendix” for audiovisual examples of these elements. 53 A.M. Jones, “African Rhythm,” Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 24, no. 1 (1954): 26. 54 Burnim and Maultsby, eds., African American Music: An Introduction, 12. 55 Ibid., 17.
25 And lastly, improvisation is the process in which “performers bring their own interpretation to songs by producing unique and varying timbres and by manipulating time, text, and pitch in ways uncommon in European musical practices.”56
West Africans’ meaningful relationship with music would not be severed once they arrived to the “New World” and had to forcibly adapt to chattel slavery. Enslaved Africans in
America would continue to retain, preserve and pass down these musical traditions that would be evidently identified in their own musical innovations, thus laying down the foundation for Black
American music.
Foundations of Black American Music
Of the 12.5 million Africans captured from their homelands to embark on the treacherous
Middle Passage between 1500-1820, only 10.7 million survived, being displaced to foreign regions across North America, South America, and the Caribbean. Of those 10.7 million, only about 388,000 Africans would reside in the New World. By 1860, the New World, which became to be known as the United States of America, would inhabit 3.9 million enslaved Black people.57 Although most Black people were taken from West Africa (modern-day Ghana,
Nigeria, Sierra Leone, for instance), it is important to recognize that they represented an array of
African languages, religions, and customs.58 And while slaves were prohibited to read and write by force and law, and English and African-language dialects developed across different regions, we can then understand music as the primary outlet through which enslaved Black people
56 Burnim and Maultsby, eds., African American Music: An Introduction, 18. 57 Henry Louis Gates Jr., “Slavery, by the Numbers,” The Root, https://www.theroot.com/slavery-by-the-numbers-1790874492 (accessed March 8, 2018). 58 African American Heritage & Ethnography, “Which Europeans Trafficked in Slaves?” National Park Service, https://www.nps.gov/ethnography/aah/aaheritage/histcontextsd.htm (accessed March 8, 2018).
26 constructed a collective Black American consciousness and identity. As Lawrence Levine stated,
“Though they [slaves] varied widely in language, institutions, gods, and familial patterns, they shared a fundamental outlook toward the past, present, and future and common means of cultural expression which could well have constituted the basis of a sense of common identity and world view capable of withstanding the impact of slavery.”59 Thus, as arguably the earliest mode of self-expression and communication for Black Americans, music gave Black people agency – agency in narrating their lived experiences and exploring the complex facets of their humanity to which they were denied. It was an outlet for emotional expression and communication.
Music was central to the everyday lives of enslaved Black people. Because the use of instruments (especially drums) were either banned by slaveholders for fear of conspiracy or restricted only to certain occasions such as Sunday worship or holiday festivities, music mainly constituted of singing and body movement. The folk music of enslaved Black Americans can be classified into three categories: recreational songs, work songs, and religious songs (commonly known as ‘spirituals’ or ‘Negro spirituals’).60 Recreational songs included, but were not limited to children’s game songs, lullabies, “songs of in-group and out-group satire, songs of nostalgia,
[and] nonsense songs.”61 Work songs were songs slaves sang during labor in order to pass time, enhance their moods, fight fatigue, and synchronize their tasks with rhythms, among other reasons. One technique of the work song tradition is the “field holler” which is described as a
“short, florid, improvised melody sung by an individual working in the fields…[that] could convey a request or communicate a need.”62
59 Lawrence Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 4. 60 Burnim and Maultsby, eds., African American Music: An Introduction, 40-46 61 Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness, 15. 62 Burnim and Maultsby, eds., African American Music: An Introduction, 45.
27 Early Black folk music also functioned as a healing mechanism. Slavery was traumatic – it was physically, mentally, and spiritually taxing on the Black body and psyche. And this trauma would not end after slavery, but would persist as anti-Black racism continues to be ubiquitous.
This is not to say that Black people are solely bound to suffering. The Black legacy of struggle is also about Black people’s resilience, strength, and survival. Music, for Black Americans, was a form of cathartic release. Music enabled the enslaved to heal, even if it meant simply getting through the day.
We can witness the capability and power of Black self-healing through spirituals, religious songs that typically described the adversities of slavery.
Spirituals
Religion and spirituality were central to the worldview of the enslaved Black person – a significant aspect to Black identity that is based in West African culture. Music theorist Teresa
L. Reed explains, “In traditional West-African culture, the spirit world actively participates in the everyday business of living. Africans recognize the roles of the supreme God and the work of various lesser divinities in their daily human existence.”63 Hence, “Music and religion are inextricably bound together in West-African culture, so much so that it is impossible to imagine one without the other. The special function of music in African religious ritual is to facilitate communication with the spirit realm…In the West-African worldview, music is intrinsically spiritual, the sacred is intrinsically musical, and both music and the divine permeate every imaginable part of life.”64 Thus, in thinking about the intertwining of music and religion, we can
63 Theresa L. Reed, The Holy Profane: Religion in Black Culture (Kentucky: The University Press of Kentucky, 2003), 2. 64 Reed, The Holy Profane, 4-5.
28 interpret music as an outlet channeling the spiritual (and healing) energy of the Black soul, as mentioned earlier. Through spirituals, W.E.B DuBois says, “the soul of the black slave spoke to men.”65
Levine asserts that, “The sacred world of the slaves was not confined to Christianity.”66
Enslaved Black people also held and passed down African spiritual beliefs and practices, even fusing them with Christian religious beliefs and practices. It wasn’t until the First and Second
Great Awakening of the 1730s and 1790s that significant numbers of slaves converted to
Christianity, specifically Baptist and Methodist denominations. Black Christian worship took place in both formal and informal settings, from living quarters to the “invisible church” of the
South to the independent Black church of the North.67 The appeal to Christianity led to the prominence of the spiritual as a key musical tradition for enslaved Black people.
While spirituals are usually characterized by four-line stanzas with a “vivid first line, a middle refrain line, and a chorus,” sometimes in a aaab or aaba rhyme scheme, they are very loose and flexible structurally.68 Their loose structure allowed room for improvisation and call and response, and often times, their lyrical context and meaning would shift depending on the setting. It was the intense emotional fervor and sense of community conveyed through spirituals that was most valued. Religion scholar Albert Raboteau elaborates:
The flexible, improvisational structure of the spirituals gave them the capacity to fit an individual slave’s specific experience into the consciousness of the group. One person’s sorrow or joy became everyone’s through song. Singing the spirituals is therefore both an intensely personal and vividly communal
65 DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk, 185. 66 Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness, 55. 67 The “invisible church” were clandestine meeting places where enslaved Black people held worship service. The independent Black church were independent congregations freed black people established in the North. 68 Robert Darden, People Get Ready! A New History of Black Gospel Music (New York, Continuum, 2004), 72.
29 experience in which an individual received consolation for sorrow and gained a heightening of joy because his experience was shared.69
Other elements of the Black spiritual tradition are repetition, “deep Biblicism” (Old and New
Testament), “blue note” (“certain tones in the major and pentatonic scale ‘flattened’ or ‘bent’ to a lower pitch”), and double-entendre meanings.70 The spiritual “Follow the Drinking Gourd,” for instance, was an active tool of mobilization and resistance through its double-entendre meanings that enabled enslaved Black people escape to the North via an Underground Railroad route. The
“drinking gourd” refers to the Big Dipper and in the song, encoded were “escape instructions and a map” from Mobile, Alabama to Ohio. 71
DuBois described spirituals as “sorrow songs” – “the music of an unhappy people, of the children of disappointment; they tell of death and suffering and unvoiced longing toward a truer world, of misty wanderings and hidden ways.”72 But within this feeling of deep sorrow, he mentions, laid a breath of hope, “a faith in the ultimate justice of things.” “Sometimes it is faith in life, sometimes a faith in death, sometimes assurance of boundless justice in some fair world beyond,” he says.73 This sense of faith was essential to the inner healing experience for the enslaved. If aufheben “is the attempt to eliminate racial pain and trauma, but preserve or hold onto Blackness as a racial identity,” in the context of American chattel slavery, aufheben is the conflict between the attempt to eliminate racial pain and trauma as result of the experience of enslavement, and the attempt to preserve and hold onto the Black collective consciousness and identity, and solidarity constructed as a result of slavery. Despite this struggle, however, spirituals provided healing for the Black soul in its themes of liberation and transcendence –
69 Darden, People Get Ready, 77. 70 Ibid., 74-76. 71 Ibid., 5. 72 DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk, 187-188. 73 Ibid., 194.
30 themes deeply entrenched in a faith and courage in not only attempting to overcome pain and trauma (liberation) caused by chattel slavery, but also faith and courage in the “more than”
(transcendence). We see these themes in the spirituals below:
Oh Freedom74 I Don’t Feel No-ways Tired75
Oh freedom! I am seekin’ for a city, Hallelujah Oh freedom! I am seekin’ for a city! Hallelu. Oh, freedom over me! For a city into de Hebben, Hallelujah, And before I’d be a slave For a city into de Heben, Hallelu. I’ll be buried in my grave And go home to my Lord and be free Lord I don’t feel no-ways tired Childaren! Oh, glory Hallelujah! No more moanin’ For I hope to shout glory when dis worl’ is on fire Chillen, No more moanin’ Oh, glory Hallelujah! No more moanin’ over me And before I’d be a slave Dere’s a better day a-comin’, Hallelujah, I’ll be buried in my grave Dere’s a better day a-comin’, Hallelu. And go home to my Lord and be free When I leave dis worl’ ob sorrow, Hallelujah, There’ll be singin’ For to jine de holy number, Hallelu. There’ll be singin’ There’ll be singin’ Lord I don’t feel no-ways tired Childaren! There’ll be singin’ over me Oh, glory Hallelujah! And before I’d be a slave For I hope to shout glory when this worl’ is on fire Chillen, I’ll be buried in my grave Oh, glory Hallelujah! And go home to my Lord and be free
There’ll be shoutin’ There’ll be shoutin’ There’ll be shoutin’ And before I’d be a slave I’ll be buried in my grave And go home to my Lord and be free
Oh freedom! Oh freedom! Oh, freedom over me! And before I’d be a slave I’ll be buried in my grave And go home to my Lord and be free
74 Accessed from: Ballad of America, “Oh Freedom!” Ballad of America, http://www.balladofamerica.com/music/indexes/songs/ohfreedom/ (accessed March13, 2018). 75Accessed from: Art Song Central, “I Don’t Feel No-ways Tired,” Art Song Central, http://artsongcentral.com/2008/burleigh-i-dont-feel-no-ways-tired/ (accessed March 13, 2018).
31 Fare Ye Well76
My true believers, fare ye well, Fare ye well, fare ye well, Fare ye well, by de grace of God, For I’m going home.
Massa Jesus give me a little broom For to sweep my heart clean, And I will try, by de grace of God, To win my way home.
In the healing experience, the attempt must be made to overcome pain and suffering and/or the circumstances that induce pain and suffering in order to liberate one’s self from that pain and eventually transcend it. The spirituals above express an awareness that one is suffering in the physical realm, a “worl’ ob sorrow” that is defined by chattel slavery in the United States.
There is the attempt to overcome the system that enforces this racial pain and suffering – in “Oh
Freedom,” for instance, one expresses that they’d rather die than to become a slave. Meanwhile, one searches for a “city” in “I Don’t Feel No-ways Tired.” It is within this need to resist, escape and liberate oneself lie hope and courage in the “more than” (“Dere’s a better day a-comin’,
Hallelu” / “When I leave dis worl’ ob sorrow”). For many enslaved Black people, especially in the context of the spirituals, the “more than” to them was heaven, which is described as “home”
(“And go home to my Lord to be free” in “Oh Freedom,” “I am seekin’ for a city! Hallelu” / “For a city into de Hebben, Halleluja” in “I Don’t Feel No-Ways Tired,” and “Fare ye well, by de grace of God” / “For I’m going home” in “Fare Ye Well”). The “more than” expressed in spirituals, to Lawrence Levine, is the internal creation of “an expanded universe,” through which slaves were “literally willing themselves reborn.”77
76 Accessed from: Thomas Wentworth Higginson, “Negro Spirituals,” The Atlantic Online, https://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/1867jun/spirit.htm (accessed March 15, 2018). 77 Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness, 33.
32 Further expanding on notions of transcendence within spirituals through his interpretation of “Oh Freedom,” James Cone explains:
Here freedom is obviously a structure of, and a movement in, historical existence. It is black slaves accepting the risk and burden of self-affirmation, of liberation in history. That is the meaning of the phrase, “And before I’ll be a slave, I’ll be buried in my grave.” But without negating history, the last line of this spiritual places freedom beyond the historical context. “And go home to my Lord and be free.” In this context freedom is eschatological. It is anticipation of freedom, a vision of a new heaven and a new earth. Black slaves recognized that human freedom is transcendent—that is, a constituent of the future—which made it impossible to identify humanity exclusively with meager attainment in history.78
Freedom and liberation for Black people is beyond an oppressive reality of enslavement, beyond
“historical existence.”79
Healing was found in an envisioning of the “more than,” and conspicuously but perhaps more significantly, in pure cathartic release. “Like tears,” Frederick Douglass says, spirituals were “a relief to aching hearts.”80 They provided the space for emotional and psychological liberation, even if temporarily. Therapy was provided not only in the singing of the spiritual, but also in the fully embodied, encapsulation in its performance. Performing the spiritual via song and bodily movement enabled one to “feel the spirit.” On the notion of feeling the spirit, Tiearea
J. Robinson in “The Healing Element of Spirituals” explains:
The feeling of the spirit causes them to “pray,” “sing,” or “dance” (Caldwell, 2003). The spirit is in control at that point and not their bodies or the system of enslavement. Young comments on the use of the body as a vehicle for the spirit. He states, “In the moment of ecstasy, the body in trance is not controlled (or even controllable for that matter). Rather, the spirit that moves through the body and by extension, the body itself is communally shared and protected. In this way, the resistant body rejects the ideology of slavery in an attack aimed at the very system of commodity exchange that would have bodies bought and sold.”81
78 Jon Michael Spencer, Re-Searching Black Music (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1996), 55. 79 Cone, James H, God of the Oppressed (New York: Seabury Press, 1975): 66. 80 Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845; reis., Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1960), 9. 81 Tiearea J. Robinson, “The Healing Element of Spirituals,” The Journal of Pan African Studies 8, no. 7 (2015): 13.
33 So not only can healing be achieved on an emotional/psychological level, but on a physical level in which the body finds itself in a state of release and ecstasy when performing spirituals, as well. This bodily ecstasy will be explained further in the next chapter.
Songs of the Soul
I believe soul manifests in this historical period, the period of Black enslavement because it is then that the Black experience, or Black legacy of struggle materializes. Spirituals enabled enslaved Black people to cope with, endure, and transcend, even if temporarily, the harsh realities of slavery through a unique form of self-expression that was otherwise denied. It carved soul as a safe space allowing Black healing and survival. Because spirituals are deeply religious/sacred and existential in context, soul is conspicuously evident as it is rooted in lived experience and the metaphysical. But how is soul conveyed in Black secular music, more specifically, soul music? Chapter three will explore this question, examining what makes soul music soul music.
34 Chapter Three
“But now if I can wrap myself up in that song, and when that song gets to be a part of me, and affects me emotionally, then the emotions that I go through, chances are I’ll be able to communicate to you. Make the people out there become a part of the life of this song that you’re singing about. That’s soul when you can do that.” – Ray Charles82
If soul music is a secular music genre with a spiritual performative aesthetic in which
Black soul is channeled, then soul music can be understood as a merger between the sacred and secular – its existence would not have been possible without the spirituals, blues and gospel.
The Blues
Emancipation in the post-Civil War period granted Black people wider access to
American society, in which they claimed limited economic independence under the exploitative sharecropping system, and had less restrictive travel opportunities which enabled many to relocate in more urban settings in the North or to initiate their search for long-lost family members. It was this phenomenon that engendered two main factors contributing to the prominence of the blues: 1) the increasing shift of religious practices and sacred music to
“institutionalized religious spaces” such as the church, and 2) a newfound sense of Black individualism due to a novel sense of autonomy and mobility after emancipation.83 Whereas confinement to the plantation fostered communal religious expression that permeated every aspect of Black slave life, post-emancipation life somewhat isolated Black people as a result of increased mobility and more individualized, solitudinous labor on small farms. Thus, communal religious practice became “increasingly enclosed within institutionalized religious spaces” such
82 Ray Charles, “A symposium on soul” interview with Pop Chronicles, March 8, 1968 (accessed April 1, 2018). 83 Angela Y. Davis, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday, (New York: Vintage Books, 1998), 8.
35 as the church.84 This solitude engendered the development of a new Black consciousness, one in which the emancipated Black person was able to reflect more inwardly on their relationship to and positioning within society as an individual. It is this new Black consciousness that shaped the blues as a “conscious expression of the Negro’s individuality and equally important, his separateness [from society].”85
The classic blues were usually sung solo, sometimes to the accompaniment of an instrument or instrumentalist. Through their exploration of secular topics rarely discussed in
American popular song prior such as sexuality, alcohol, and unemployment, the blues singer brought a sense of “realism and seriousness, combined with concentration on the self and a willingness to delve into sadness, deep feelings, emotions and confessions.”86 Thus, like “sorrow songs,” the term blues is associated with feelings of melancholy and sadness. Although very much unlike other genres of the time, the blues is also greatly influenced by spirituals and work songs of the formerly enslaved, adapting several Black performative elements such as call-and- response and the blue note. The two genres, however, are different in the way the performer approaches their relationship to the world. James Cone expresses that the blues convey a
“stubborn refusal to go beyond the existential problem and substitute other-worldly answers.”87
In conversation with Cone’s commentary, scholar Joel Rudinow argues that the blues “seem[ed] to have abandoned all hope and lost all faith in divine salvation from the trials and tribulations of this world.”88 Whereas the spirituals performer found healing in the hopeful envisioning of a
“more than” (ie. a promised land) that extends beyond the material realm, the blues performer
84 Davis, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism, 5. 85 Ibid., 86 ; pp. 5-6 86 Burnim and Maultsby, eds., African American Music: An Introduction, 125. 87 James Cone, The Spirituals and the Blues (1972; reis., Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1992): 99. 88 Rudinow, Soul Music, 66.
36 found healing in being able to openly express personal matters and releasing and transcending the emotional pain stemming from that. Describing the blues as an impulse, Ralph Ellison states:
The blues is an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one’s aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism. As a form, the blues is an autobiographical chronicle of personal catastrophe expressed lyrically.89
Thus, healing in the context of the blues was not found in an appeal to God, as with spirituals, but rather from the sense of relief one felt in voicing their troubles in the material realm.
Gospel
The increasing institutionalization of Black religious practice in the post-Civil War period would also lead to the creation of gospel music, a genre formed within growing urban
Black churches following the First and Second Great Migration. As the direct descendent of spirituals, 90 gospel also shares elements such as communal engagement via call-and-response structure, improvisation, and polyrhythm. Yet, gospel music can also be considered a unique reinterpretation of the spiritual in its heavily emphasized, evocative and ecstatic performative aesthetic. The gospel performative aesthetic is characterized by: “fully embodied timbres emanating from the chest rather than the head,” melisma (the singing of a single syllable over several pitches), glossolalia/speaking in tongues (“uttering words or phrases in charismatic worship, which are spoken in a language intelligible only through spiritual discernment”), shout music (“an ecstatic expression of worship through demonstrative behavior”), testifying
(“speaking or singing spontaneously about [one’s] faith and experience”), and “catching the
Holy Ghost/Spirit (a religious form of spirit possession).”91 These techniques, glossolalia,
89 Ralph Ellison, Shadow and Act (1964; reis., New York: Vintage International, 1995): 90. 90 Robert Darden, People Get Ready!: A New History of Black Gospel Music (New York: Continuum, 2004): 183. 91 Burnim and Maultsby, eds., “Gospel,” in African American Music: An Introduction.
37 “shouting” and “catching the Holy Ghost” especially, can be thus understood as a physical embodiment or performative expression of aufheben and the healing experience in which the body is in an ecstatic, trance-like state, temporarily liberating itself from the corporeal reality while keeping connection to Black cultural expressive traditions (like the spirituals) intact.
Johannes Riedel states, “Many of the black-derived hymns, like many of the old gospel songs, take the singer out of his ordinary day-to-day existence to what might be conceived of as “a different world”…After having their [members of the congregation] consciousness altered, their spirits relieved, and their souls temporarily and religiously lifted up, people are better prepared to return to the mundane “everydayness” of reality.”92
Healing in gospel music, like spirituals, is also rooted in an ethos of faith. Gospel, however, emphasized a more joyful, uplifting feeling. Referencing the “Father of Gospel Music”
Thomas Dorsey, scholar Robert Darden mentions, “Dorsey himself made the same distinction, saying that while ‘spirituals are mostly a spontaneous outburst,’ gospel songs are composed with a goal—'an expoundation [sic] of that something good’ that will ‘help somebody else.’ Dorsey and others also emphasized the emotional content of gospel music—the joyful, upbeat retelling of the ‘good news’ to contrast it with the often ‘sad and sorrowful’ spirituals and blues.”93 While gospel music explored “images of paranoia and of the ugliness of ghetto life…testimonies of everyday life experiences, trials, tribulations, troubles…[and] black anger, black pride, and black power,” it urged for a better future and peace and harmony in heaven, finding redemption from one’s burdens.
92 Riedel, Soul Music, Black and White, 140. 93 Darden, People Get Ready!, 183-4.
38 It is important to note, however, that gospel music is sacred music based in Christian theology. Healing in the context of gospel music, while embodied, is through a Christian lens of redemption faith. What makes soul music unique is that as a secular music genre (like the blues), even though adopting gospel performative aesthetics, is not restricted within the boundaries of
Christian theology. Any Black person, regardless of spiritual/religious/philosophical identification, is capable of relating and connecting to the healing nature of soul music. Soul music is an accessible embrace and blend of the sacred and secular.
Soul Music
Joel Rudinow argues, “The blues are every bit as integral to gospel music as gospel music is to soul music.”94 Soul music is a genre deriving elements from rhythm and blues and gospel music that originated in the 1950s, but arose in the 1960s and 70s as Black music became more commercialized. As the soundtrack of social movements such as the Civil Rights Movement and
Black Power Movement, the genre is rooted in pro-Black consciousness.95 Soul music critiqued the status of society in the context of anti-Black oppression, advocated for social change and justice, and articulated the hope for a better future and society. Additionally, another major theme soul music explored was love: romantic and sexual love, self-love, love for others/the community/world. These two themes, social commentary and love, merged together in soul music in a way that advocated the values and demands of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements: the importance of cultivating love for a better future and just society, love for different races all over the world, love of Blackness (ie. “Black is Beautiful” slogan), among
94 Rudinow, Soul Music, 68. 95 Mark Anthony Neal, What the Music Said: Black Popular Music and Black Public Culture (New York: Routledge, 1999): xi.
39 others. Soul music, then, broadened the concept of love: whereas spirituals and gospel music fixated on a love and devotion to God, soul music replaced “God” with “lover,” or rather
“man/woman.” “[T]he worshipped God (“He”) became the prosaic object of worldly affection
(“she”).96 It explored and emphasized the importance of love in healing for Black people. bell hooks, on the significance of love states, “Love remains for black people a crucial path for healing…It is not too late for black people to return to love, to ask again the metaphysical questions commonly raised by black artists and thinkers during the heyday of freedom struggles, questions about the relationship between dehumanization and our capacity to love, questions about internalized racism and self-hatred.”97
Thus, soul in this period is rearticulated as a merger between the spiritual and material
(political): the life force that keeps “going on” in the fight for a “more than” that is a loving, equitable, and a racially just society. It also becomes a signifier for a proud Black identity.
The soul music aesthetic heavily reflected gospel aesthetics with its “intensity of emotion and total physical involvement,” as many soul musicians were raised in Black church settings and trained in the gospel music tradition. Heavy emphasis is on vocalization through “grunts, shouts, and moans,” improvisatory techniques, and wide-timbre and pitch range that capture an emotional depth.98 Riedel expresses, “Soul musicians seem to communicate honestly from the deepest recesses of their personalities. The beauty of their expression emanates from the rumble of gospel chords and the plaintive cry of the blues. They combine burning emotional conviction, a strong rhythmic pulse, and earthly lyrics.”99
96 Teach Rock, “Gospel Music and the Birth of Soul,” Book 1: Birth of Rock, http://teachrock.org/lesson/gospel-music-and-the-birth-of-soul/# (accessed April 29, 2018). 97 bell hooks, Salvation: Black People and Love, (New York: Harper Perennial, 2001): 14. 98 Burnim and Maultsby, eds., African American Music: An Introduction, 286-88. 99 Riedel, Soul Music, Black and White, 11.
40 The concept of soul becomes more prevalent in popular consciousness not only within the Black community as a result of the Black racial justice movements of the 1960s and 1970s, but within the general American public due to the increasing commercialization of Black culture and music as well (ie. “Soul Train”). How is soul expressed in popular soul songs of this era, and how do these varying expressions of soul explore notions of healing? The following section will include close readings and analyses of the lyrical content and live performance aesthetic of several soul songs that defined the 1960s and 70s.
“A Change is Gonna Come,” Sam Cooke (1964)
Sam Cooke “put the spirit of the Black church into popular music.”100 As a gospel singer who crossed over to secular music in the late 1950s, Sam Cooke is hailed as one of the forefathers of soul music. Perhaps his most poignant song, “A Change Is Gonna Come,” contemplates the Black freedom struggle in America, deemed as the anthem of the Civil Rights
Movement.101 The composition was inspired by an incident in which Cooke and his bandmates were denied from checking into a Louisiana hotel because of their race.102
“A Change Is Gonna Come” is a vulnerable piece – Cooke, in his clear, haunting voice, shares his personal experiences directly with the listener. He introduces himself, telling the listener that he was “born by the river / in a little tent.” Cooke delves into personal anecdotes: he
100 American Masters (PBS), “Crossing Over,” PBS, http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/sam-cooke-crossing-over/1506/ (accessed April 5, 2018) 101 David Cantwell, “The Unlikely Story Of ‘A Change Is Gonna Come,’” The New Yorker, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-unlikely-story-of-a-change-is-gonna-come (accessed April 5, 2018). 102 NPR Music Interviews, “Sam Cooke And The Song That ‘Almost Scared Him,’” National Public Radio, https://www.npr.org/2014/02/01/268995033/sam-cooke-and-the-song-that-almost- scared-him (accessed April 4, 2018).
41 is warned not to “hang around” downtown. He is denied the help of his “brother” who ends up
“knockin’” him “back down on [his] knees.” These memories are certainly painful and while they are individual memories, they are also experiences of a collective memory of anti-Black racism. They demonstrate that encountering racism is inevitable for Black people – even though the threat of racial terrorism (insinuated by the “don’t hang around” warning) looms over one, there seems to be no solution as not even Cooke’s “brother” (whom I interpret as “the white man”) will come to aid. This leaves Cooke in despair, as he tells us “It’s been too hard living” and that “There been times when [he] thought [he] couldn’t last for long.” He’s “afraid to die” because he doesn’t know “what’s up there / beyond the sky.” Despite this feeling of despair,
Cooke remains hopeful, repeatedly assuring listeners in his chorus, “It’s been a long time coming
/ But I know a change is gonna come, oh yes it will.” While the change is not specified, it is no doubt that it is one for the better, and one that is bound to happen. Thus, healing in the context of song is Cooke’s retelling and processing of his experiences of racial hurt and pain. The “more than,” an experience beyond oppression, is in the material world that is without anti-Black oppression. Healing, for Cooke (and perhaps for listeners, too), is transcending those painful experiences by finding comfort in the affirmation (“oh yes it will”) that a long-awaited change is soon to come.
“Keep On Pushing,” The Impressions (1964)
“Keep on Pushing” captures the epitome of soul, urging the Black listener to persevere and find strength in times of adversity. Lead singer Curtis Mayfield expresses that he is confronted by “a great big stone wall / [that] stands ahead of [him],” however, he is not discouraged – he is determined to “move on aside.” He seeks to transcends the obstacles in his way (“Move up a little higher,” “I’ll reach that higher goal”). Although Mayfield does not
42 exactly know how (“Some way, somehow”) or when (“maybe some day”), he exudes faith and confidence (“I know that I can make it”) in moving forward because he has “strength,” “a little bit of soul,” and “pride.” His Christian faith (“Hallelujah, hallelujah”) further reaffirms his strong sense of trust and confidence. The “more than” is not clearly defined but one can infer that the notion of moving higher as expressed by Mayfield is about getting to a point in society in which life conditions are better and more equitable for Black Americans. While “Keep on Pushing” is considered a defining song of the Civil Rights era, it can overall be seen as a motivational song for the Black legacy of struggle more broadly. Moreover, it is quite reminiscent of work songs, relying on the spirit of motivation and hope to get the work done, to “keep on pushing.” This spirit, soul, is a necessary force in driving the will to heal and survive. Keith Gilyard writes:
A people full of soul, that black, animating impulse hard to define but easy to recognize, will struggle inexorably toward success on the racial front. To paraphrase the songwriter, these people have their strength, and therefore it doesn’t make any sense not to keep on pushing—keep pushing the stone walls to the side with their determination and pride, pushing, despite setbacks like the assassination of Medgar Evers, on to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.103
“Please, Please, Please” TAMI Show Live Performance, James Brown (1964)104
“Please, Please, Please” is a song by “Godfather of Soul” James Brown, in which he pleads for his lover to not abandon him. When separating the secular lyrical content of the song and his performance at the Teenage Awards Music International (TAMI) concert, it is as if James
Brown is performing at the Black church. His performance is clearly that of gospel performative aesthetic. It is explosive and ecstatic. He testifies his love for his woman and begs her repeatedly
(“please, please, please”) to stay with him. Brown’s desperate plea for mercy throughout the
103 Keith Gilyard, Composition and Cornel West: Notes toward a Deep Democracy (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2008): 79. 104 James Brown, “James Brown performs ‘Please Please Please’ at the TAMI Show (Live),” YouTube video, 6:16, March 16, 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vruy2GRUsV8 (accessed February 8, 2018).
43 performance consumes him entirely. He shouts. He collapses on his knees to find himself consoled by his band members who pat him on the back and place a cape over him as they guide him away from the microphone. However, Brown demonstrates the force and power of soul is just too overwhelming – he resists the comfort expressed by his bandmembers, the cape, abandoning both to return to the microphone stand and plead to his lover yet again. Thus this cycle, which repeats itself, can be interpreted as a physical embodiment or performative expression of soul and aufheben. Brown struggles as he perpetually drifts between the corporeal and spiritual/metaphysical: he transcends from a place of hurt and suffering into himself in an ecstatic, trance-like state (abolishment), but then finds himself grounded back into reality whenever he collapses. The more this cycle repeats, the more spiritual fervor and energy accumulates and is felt more intensely not only by Brown, but by audience members as well.
Everyone in the room feels the weight of James Brown’s soul as it constantly revives itself and becomes more powerful. Reflecting on this performance and its gospel aesthetic, James Brown mentions, “It’s a Holiness feeling—like a Baptist thing…It’s a spiritual-background thing.
You’re involved and you don’t want to quit. That’s the definition of soul, you know. Being involved and they try to stop you and you just don’t want to stop.” Moreover, RJ Smith elaborates, “That falling-to-the-knees-overcome-with-emotion dramaturgy is straight out of the
Holiness Church, out of a belief system holding, in the charnel heat of the moment, that a person could be overpowered by a sudden tap from the Holy Ghost. Holy Ghost jumpers were what they called those filled with the spirit in the earliest days of Pentecostalism. It was a form of possession, of yielding with glory to a higher force.”105
105 David Remnick, “The Possessed: James Brown In Eighteen Minutes,” The New York, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/possessed-james-brown-eighteen-minutes (accessed May 1, 2018).
44
“Ball of Confusion,” The Temptations (1970)
“The world is in chaos,” The Temptations seem to warn us. There are too many issues in this “ball of confusion:” from drug abuse (“The sale of pills are at an all time high”) to city riots
(“The cities aflame in the summer time”) to economic instability (“Unemployment rising fast”).
There is “Fear in the air, tension everywhere.” The list goes on and on, and unlike other songs analyzed in this section, “Ball of Confusion” has a very pessimistic outlook. Thomas Ryan commented that the song “layer[ed] virtually every contemporary complaint that could fit into the lyrics and spewing them out in rapid-fire success. This song didn’t bother to offer any solutions, but it was sure one hell of a gripe-fest.”106 While this song may not convey any sense of courage, hope, optimism, etc or the “more than,” healing in this case is an overt awareness of adversity that propels a cathartic release of frustration and discontent. The Temptations remind us that the will to keep “going on” can indeed be a taxing journey.
“To Be Young, Gifted and Black,” Nina Simone (1970)
A song commemorating Black playwright Lorraine Hansberry, “To Be Young, Gifted, and Black” is an anthem by “High Priestess of Soul” Nina Simone that echoes the spirit of Black self-love and pride.107 Simone directly addresses the “billion [Black] boys and girls” all over the world, professing that they are “young, gifted and black.” She tells them to recognize this “fact” and urges for a full embracing and promotion of this “great truth:” she advises one to “open
106 Thomas Ryan, “Ball of Confusion,” Super Seventies, https://www.superseventies.com/sw_ballofconfusion.html (accessed May 1, 2018) 107 Song title is the name of an unfinished play by Hansberry ; Evan Garza, “To Be Young, Gifted and Black: The Civil Rights Legacy of Nina Simone,” Blanton Museum of Art, https://blantonmuseum.org/2015/02/to-be-young-gifted-and-black-the-civil-rights-legacy-of- nina-simone-2/ (accessed April 30, 2018)
45 [their] heart” whenever they “feel really low” or find themselves “haunted by [their] youth” and remember that they are indeed young, gifted, and Black. She prompts the older Black generation
(“We must begin to tell our young”) to inform the youth that they should embrace their gifts and talents, that “There’s a world waiting for [them]” and their journey has “just begun.” Thus
Simone calls for a self-realization of the beauty of Blackness, actively resisting deeply entrenched racist ideologies and depictions of Black identity. This song is a reclamation and acceptance of soul: when one acknowledges that they are young, gifted, and Black, Simone says, their “soul [is] intact” – they are firmly rooted in the time period’s reshaping and expression of soul as a positive, self-defined self-image. In its celebration and empowerment, “Young, Gifted, and Black” is no doubt rooted in healing. The Black individual is called to transcend racial pain and suffering by acknowledging and accepting the beauty and strength of Black identity, as well as taking pride and passion in the Black legacy of struggle. Healing, tied to the concept of self- love, is an uplifting embrace and restoration and affirmation of the wholeness of the Black self.
“What’s Going On,” Marvin Gaye (1971)
“What’s Going On” is the opening track of Marvin Gaye’s eponymous eleventh studio album, inspired by Gaye’s brother’s return from fighting in Vietnam, as well as Four Tops band member Renaldo “Obie” Benson’s witnessing of police brutality upon anti-war protestors in
Berkeley, California.108 The album, based on the perspective of a Vietnam war veteran returning
108 The song was originally written by Motown songwriter Al Cleveland based on Benson’s retelling of the experience and offered to Marvin Gaye, who revised and edited the song ; Dorian Lynskey, 33 Revolutions per Minute: A History of Protest Songs, from Billie Holiday to Green Day (New York: Ecco Press, 2011): 155.
46 to the United States, was regarded as a bold departure for Gaye, who was known for his soul hits that usually centered on romantic love, desire, and sexuality.
The track opens up with a warm welcome from friends at a party: “Hey, what’s happening?” “My man!” “Brother, what’s up?” These questions, although specifically addressed to the veteran, provoke a serious rumination on “what’s going on” in society. Gaye, in his passionate voice, expresses the concerns of the veteran, who addresses members of society. He tells “mother” that “there’s too many of [them] crying,” and “brother” that “there’s far too many of [them] dying.” He reassures “father” that “we don’t need to escalate” and the police to not
“punish [him] with brutality.” Society is in upheaval – there is war, death, grief, and protest
(“picket lines and picket signs”). The question of “what’s going on” is two-dimensional: it is a mere questioning and answering (“Talk to me, so you can see / Oh, what’s going on”) of what is occurring in American society at the moment (the Vietnam War, Black racial justice activism, etc) and additionally, a plea for individuals to morally assess the condition of society in the present moment. What comes out of Gaye’s rumination is a call for love, empathy, and compassion in order to form a better society. War isn’t the answer and instead, he asserts that
“…only love can conquer hate,” that society needs to “…find a way / to bring some loving here today” and “some understanding here today.”
Healing society is also healing the individual and the root of healing is love. Whereas
Sam Cooke is confident that “a change is gonna come,” Gaye seems more concerned about how that change can be initiated, indicating that society is capable of attaining the “more than” he envisions.
“I’ll Take You There,” The Staple Singers (1972)
47 I interpret “I’ll Take You There” as an ‘invitation’ to the “more than.” In her robust, confident timbre, lead singer Mavis Staple of the family band assures the listener about her knowledge of existence of the “more than” (“I know a place”). She explains that this is a place where “Ain’t nobody cryin,’ ain’t nobody worried / Ain’t no smilin’ faces…Lyin’ to the races” and prods the listener to join her and “take [her] by the hand” as she “lead[s] the way.” This song clearly adapts elements of the gospel performative aesthetic, which is no surprise at all as The
Staple Singers were both a gospel and soul music group. Mavis grunts, she leads a call and response between her sisters, father, and male instrumentalists, asking them to also take her
“there” – she asks her sisters (“Help me, come on, come on / Somebody help me now”), who respond “I’ll take you there.” She calls on her father (“Play on it, play on it, big daddy now”) and bass player David Hood (“Baby, little Davey, easy now, help me out / Come on, little Davey, alright”). Getting to the “more than,” then, is a collective effort. Journalist Bill Friskics-Warren elucidates:
The “I” in “I’ll Take You There” refers to…giving voice to [a] hunger for transcendence, [to] create a window to something transformative for the rest of us…Mavis Staples vows to take listeners to a wondrous place where nobody is crying, worried, lying or being lied to, she isn’t just promising to lead them there. Moaning in that gruff, voluptuous alto of hers, Staples also is imploring them to help her get to that place, which is just what her sisters Yvonne and Cleo pledge to do when they shout “I’ll take you there” by way of response…[The song] witnesses to how reaching a transcendental plane often involves people taking each other there, to how transcendence often is more a matter of [“you and me”] than anything else.109
One may perceive the “more than” to be heaven as Mavis uses Christian religious terminology throughout the song such as “mercy” and “Lord.” Whether it is sacred or secular, the “more than” in the context of “I’ll Take You There” is a place where racial pain and suffering do not exist, where one finds comfort and healing.
109 Bill Friskics-Warren, I’ll Take You There: Pop Music and the Urge for Transcendence (New York: Continuum, 2005): x-xi.
48 “Love Train,” The O’Jays (1972)
On this track, The O’Jays promote a global unity that is rooted in love. They announce,
“People all over the world / Join hands / Start a love train, love train,” calling onto different countries (England, Russia, China, countries in Africa including Egypt, and Israel) to “get on board.” They warn, “Please don’t miss this train at the station / Cause if you miss it, I feel sorry, sorry for you.” The love train is inclusive: everyone is needed and wanted in this creation and flourishing of a global love culture. This song emanates love and joy through its high-spirited vocals – the power of soul is too great, irresistible. I listen to this song and feel this vibrant, heartwarming expression of Black joy and carefreeness. When the listener, too, aboards the love train, it is like all pain and worries are instantly alleviated. Member and co-writer Kenny Gamble reflected on “Love Train” as an attempt to write “about the world as we saw it. We felt that all people over the world should be at peace with each other. That was the message we were trying to relate.”110
110 John A. Jackson, A House on Fire: The Rise and Fall of Philadelphia Soul (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004): 123. E-Book.
49
Conclusion
“If black people are to survive, black music must survive, and if black music is to survive, black people will survive.” – Alfred Opobor111
As I have examined the scope of Black American music between the 17th and 20th centuries in my research, I cannot help but feel proud at how far we, Black people, have come. A people from a continent of flourishing hairstyles, languages, and economies who were abducted and brought into the not-so-new “New World,” where they were forcibly enslaved, their labor becoming vital in building a nation called the United States of America. Their labor was arduous, distressing, even traumatic on the body and psyche, but in the midst of this, these people came together in this shared experience to create a collective identity, consciousness, and culture. These people became Black Americans who built an abode called soul, in which they contemplated their existence and purpose in a society that seemed to be turned against them, struggled with the dilemma of aufheben, and also found comfort knowing that something better existed for them, the
“more than.” Black Americans decorated soul in many things, some of them being music and religion. They brought embellishments like polyrhythm and call and response from their motherland, combined with the Christian theology they adopted in the New World, furbishing them into spirituals. Music then became an embellishment, or rather, expression of soul.
Soul was theirs – it was self-made and self-defined. So not only did they find comfort, but healing. It was a place where they found freedom and liberation as they were able to transcend the hurtful society, even if it were just a moment. In soul they sung spirituals, yearning for peace and happiness in heaven. As long as the abode stood in times of adversities, Black Americans survived.
111 Accessed from: Donald Byrd, “The Meaning of Black Music.” The Black Scholar 3, no. 10 (1972): 31.
50 It is soul that empowered the Black self to have faith in a “more than,” but also in creating one.
Thus soul seemed to be telling them “Secure this foundation. Keep going on” – and so they did, because it was what they needed to survive and heal with the passage of time and the perpetual transformations of the structures that oppressed them, even though they were eventually freed from physical enslavement. In this passage of time, soul was modified, modernized. Soul was not only where spirituals resided, but the blues, gospel, too. These expressions inspired soul music, which broadened what healing meant to the Black American. Soul became more than a metaphysical abode of love for God and faith in his plan of redemption. It also became a politically-rooted abode for self-love, love for community and world, Black pride, and racial justice advocacy – an abode that stood in resistance against the anti-Black structures and ideologies of the outside world. Soul music asked “What’s going on?” expressed despair living in a ball of confusion, and affirmed that one could reach, could be taken to the “more than.”
Black music is testimony to soul survival and healing, and continues to serve as such in this contemporary period. Not only did Stevie Wonder’s soul soothe me in my days of puberty, assuring me “Don’t you worry ‘bout a thing,” but today, even in the age of mass incarceration and police brutality – two major societal issues that disproportionately affects Black Americans –
Solange’s soul in “Cranes in the Sky” tells me to heal, to wash “away, away, away, away, away” the hardships Black women like myself face in America.112
Soul will never die as long as Black people are alive, despite our experiences in a society that seeks to deny our livelihood – we are continually revived and healed by the power of soul.
112 Lyric from “Cranes in the Sky,” a song on her 2016 album A Seat at the Table.
51 APPENDIX
CHAPTER TWO Audiovisual examples (from YouTube) of elements of West African music can be found on the file.
Polyrhythm:
1) “Master Drummers of Ghana are coming our way!” 2) “Wanna Be Startin’ Something,” Michael Jackson (1982)
Call and Response/Antiphony:
1) ‘“Call and response’ in the Maasai Mara, Kenya” 2) “Lightning- Long John (Old song by a chain gang)” 3) “Count Basie – Splanky:” Call and response between instruments can be identified starting 0:35 4) “Father Stretch My Hands:” Call and response can be identified at 4:50
Vocalization (different forms):
1) Scat singing in “Ella Fitzgerald : One note Samba (scat singing) 1969” 2) Beat-boxing in “Doug E Fresh beatboxing” 3) Melismas in “A Rainha Dos Melismas (Mariah Carey) [Showcase]”
Audience Participation:
1) “Stevie Wonder – Soul Train:” can be especially identified at 9:18
Improvisation:
1) Freestyling in “Kendrick Lamar freestyle on Sway in the Morning”
52 CHAPTER THREE
Song Lyrics
“A Change is Gonna Come,” Sam Cooke (1964)
I was born by the river In a little tent
Oh and just like the river I've been running Ever since
It's been a long time, a long time coming But I know a change gonna come, oh yes it will
It's been too hard living But I'm afraid to die
Cause I don't know what's up there Beyond the sky
It's been a long, a long time coming But I know a change gonna come, oh yes it will
I go to the movie And I go downtown
Somebody keep tellin' me don't hang around It's been a long, a long time coming But I know a change gonna come, oh yes it will
Then I go to my brother
And I say brother help me please
But he winds up knockin' me Back down on my knees, oh
There have been times that I thought I couldn't last for long
But now I think I'm able to carry on
It's been a long, a long time coming 53 But I know a change is gonna come, oh yes it will
“Ball of Confusion,” The Temptations (1970)
One, two…one, two, three, four, ow!
People moving out, people moving in Why, because of the color of their skin Run, run, run but you sure can't hide An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth Vote for me and I'll set you free Rap on, brother, rap on
Well, the only person talking about love thy brother is the (preacher) And it seems nobody's interested in learning but the (teacher) Segregation, determination, demonstration, integration Aggravation, humiliation, obligation to our nation
Ball of confusion Oh yeah, that's what the world is today Woo, hey, hey
The sale of pills are at an all time high Young folks walking round with their heads in the sky The cities ablaze in the summer time And oh, the beat goes on
Evolution, revolution, gun control, sound of soul Shooting rockets to the moon, kids growing up too soon Politicians say more taxes will solve everything And the band played on
So, round and around and around we go Where the world's headed, nobody knows Oh, great googa-mooga, can't you hear me talking to you?
Just a ball of confusion
54 Oh yeah, that's what the world is today Woo, hey
Fear in the air, tension everywhere Unemployment rising fast, the Beatles new record's a gas
And the only safe place to live is on an Indian reservation
And the band played on Eve of destruction, tax deduction, city inspectors, bill collectors Mod clothes in demand, population out of hand, suicide, too many bills Hippies moving to the hills, people all over the world are shouting, end the war And the band played on
Great googa-looga, can't you hear me talking to you? Sayin' ball of confusion That's what the world is today, hey, hey
Let me hear ya, let me hear ya, let me hear ya Sayin', ball of confusion That's what the world is today, hey, hey Let me hear ya, let me hear ya, let me hear ya, let me hear ya, let me hear ya Ball of confusion
55 “I’ll Take You There,” The Staple Singers (1972)
Oh mmm, I know a place
Ain't nobody cryin', ain't nobody worried Ain't no smilin' faces, mmm, no no
Lyin' to the races Help me, come on, come on Somebody, help me now (I'll take you there) Help me, ya'all (I'll take you there) Help me now (I'll take you there) Oh! (I'll take you there) Oh! Oh! Mercy! (I'll take you there) Oh, let me take you there (I'll take you there) Oh-oh! Let me take you there! (I'll take you there)
Play your, play your piano now All right , ah do it do it, come on now Play on it, play on it, make daddy now Daddy daddy daddy, play your
Ooh, Lord, all right now Baby, little Davey, easy now, help me out Come on, little Davey, all right Dum-dum-dum-dum Sock it, sock it, ah, oh, oh!
I know a place, y'all (I'll take you there) Ain't nobody cryin' (I'll take you there) Ain't nobody worried (I'll take you there) No smilin' faces (I'll take you there) Uh-uh (Lyin' to the races) (I'll take you there) Oh, no Oh! (I'll take you there) Oh oh oh! (I'll take you there)
56 Mercy now! (I'll take you there) I'm callin' callin' callin' mercy (I'll take you there) Mercy mercy! (I'll take you there) Let me (I'll take you there) Oh oh! I'll take you there (I'll take you there)
57 “Keep On Pushing,” The Impressions (1964)
Keep on pushing Keep on pushing I've got to keep on pushing (mmm-hmm) I can't stop now Move up a little higher Some way, somehow Cause I've got my strength And it don't make sense Not to keep on pushin’
Hallelujah, hallelujah Keep on pushin’
Now maybe some day (mmm-hmm) I'll reach that higher goal I know I can make it With just a little bit of soul Cause I've got my strength And it don't make sense Not to keep on pushin’
Now look-a look (look-a look) A-look-a yonder What's that I see A great big stone wall Stands there ahead of me But I've got my pride And I'll move on aside And keep on pushing
Hallelujah, hallelujah Keep on pushin’ Keep on pushin’
58 What I say now Keep on pushin’ Well it's all right Keep on pushin’
59 “Love Train,” The O’Jays (1972)
People all over the world (everybody) Join hands (join) Start a love train, love train People all over the world (all the world, now) Join hands (love ride) Start a love train (love ride), love train
The next stop that we make will be England Tell all the folks in Russia, and China, too Don't you know that it's time to get on board And let this train keep on riding, riding on through Well, well
People all over the world (you don't need no money) Join hands (come on) Start a love train, love train (don't need no ticket, come on) People all over the world (Join in, ride this train) Join in (Ride this train, y'all) Start a love train (Come on, train), love train
All of you brothers over in Africa Tell all the folks in Egypt, and Israel, too Please don't miss this train at the station 'Cause if you miss it, I feel sorry, sorry for you Well
People all over the world (Sisters and brothers) Join hands (join, come on) Start a love train (ride this train, y'all), love train (Come on) People all over the world (Don't need no tickets) Join hands (come on, ride) Start a love train, love train Ride, let it ride
60 Let it ride Let it ride People, ain't no war
People all over the world (on this train) Join in (ride the train) Start a love train, love train (ride the train, y'all) People all over the world (come on) Join hands (you can ride or stand, yeah) Start a love train, love train (makin' love) People all over the world ('round the world, y'all) Join hands (come on) Start a love train, love train People all over the world Join hands Start a love train, love train People all over the world Join hands Start a love train, love train People all over the world Join hands Start a love train, love train
61 “To Be Young, Gifted and Black,” Nina Simone (1970)
To be young, gifted and black, Oh what a lovely precious dream To be young, gifted and black, Open your heart to what I mean
In the whole world you know There are billion boys and girls Who are young, gifted and black, And that's a fact!
Young, gifted and black We must begin to tell our young There's a world waiting for you This is a quest that's just begun
When you feel really low Yeah, there's a great truth you should know When you're young, gifted and black Your soul's intact
Young, gifted and black How I long to know the truth There are times when I look back And I am haunted by my youth
Oh but my joy of today Is that we can all be proud to say To be young, gifted and black Is where it's at
62 “What’s Going On,” Marvin Gaye (1971)
Mother, mother There's too many of you crying Brother, brother, brother There's far too many of you dying You know we've got to find a way To bring some lovin' here today, eh eh
Father, father We don't need to escalate You see, war is not the answer For only love can conquer hate You know we've got to find a way To bring some lovin' here today, oh oh oh
Picket lines and picket signs Don't punish me with brutality Talk to me, so you can see Oh, what's going on What's going on Yeah, what's going on Ah, what's going on
In the mean time Right on, baby Right on brother Right on babe
Mother, mother, everybody thinks we're wrong Oh, but who are they to judge us Simply 'cause our hair is long Oh, you know we've got to find a way To bring some understanding here today Oh oh oh
63 Picket lines and picket signs Don't punish me with brutality C'mon talk to me So you can see What's going on Yeah, what's going on Tell me what's going on I'll tell you what's going on, ooh ooh ooh ooh Right on baby Right on baby
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