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Friday, April 14, 2006
GO DOWN, MOSES
Louis Armstrong
Available on: Louis and the Good Book
Verve : 2001
[Buy It]
HASSIDIC CHANT
Paul Robeson
Available on: The Collector's Paul Robeson
Monitor Records : 1993
[Buy It]
I SHALL BE RELEASED
Nina Simone
Best of Nina Simone
RCA : 1970
[Buy It]
NO MORE TEARS (ENOUGH IS ENOUGH)
Barbra Streisand and Donna Summer
On the Radio
Casablanca : 1979
Available on: Donna Summer: Gold
Hip-O Records : 2005
[Buy It]
BELLE
Al Green
The Belle Album
Capitol : 1977
Available on: Greatest Hits
The Right Stuff : 1995
[Buy It]
In college I majored in PLO Studies, so, when Passover came around, I held liberation seders for my comrades in the struggle (kefiyyas optional). These days, I'm drawn to cultural conflicts closer to home, like the love-hate relationship between blacks and Jews, and I'm throwing a party for Pesach in a Black Judah frame of mind. "Go Down Moses" is best-known as Harriet Tubman's signature theme; it also nicely summarizes a chunk of the Passover haggadah (and beats the hell out of Dai-dai-yenu, let me tell you). Louis knows from Daiyenu: growing up in pre-WWI New Orleans, he worked for a Russian Jewish family as a delivery boy and occasional shabbos goy. In 1969, writing his memoirs from Beth Israel Hospital, he reminisced pointedly about the Karnovskys - the point being, the basic got-it-more-together-ness of Jews over blacks.
Armstrong's childhood years were the early days of the NAACP (founded and funded by Jewish philanthropists), when blacks and Jews were still "just friends." By the 30s and 40s, the heyday of the Old Left, they'd fallen in love and were thinking long-term. Richard Wright met his second Jewish wife through the American Communist Party (his first was a Russian ballerina). And Paul Robeson sang this Kaddish in Moscow and at rallies for the new state of Israel, introducing it as an anti-imperialist song. My, how times have changed.
But before the '67 war and Black Power tore the happy couple apart, blacks and Jews went shoulder to shoulder in the civil rights movement. Old Left networks helped the movement expand; Jewish kids like Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman joined James Chaney and Medgar Evers on the wrong side of KKK bullets. Bob Dylan did his part, opening for MLK in 1963 and writing a spiritual of his own,"I Shall Be Released," in 1967. Nina Simone, no slouch in the protest song department herself, summons the last shreds of necessary hope, singing as if deliverance might be shining out, just over yonder. Within five years, disgusted by the persistence of racism and despondent over the collapse of the civil rights movement, she'd exile herself from the States for good.
In the "Hassidic Chant," Robeson sangAnd an end let there be
To all this sorrow and suffering
To which the women respond, enough is enough, already! Disco is a genre built on black women's voices and there's more than a little of the Sophie-Tucker-in-blackface vibe to this Gloria Gaynor knock-off, released the year after "I Will Survive" made female empowerment safe for the dance floor. But my mom is a huge Streisand fan, and when Barbra picked Donna Summer to sing one of the songs from Yentl at the Oscars...well, in the decade of Meir Kahane and his Jewish Defense League, a Jesse Jackson on his way to Hymietown and a pre-Mendelssohn Farrakhan, this might count as one of very few diplomatic successes in black-Jewish relations.
Al Green isn't Jewish, but he could be. If you saw his name in a phonebook in Newark or Harlem, how could you tell? "Belle" is the Song of Songs of our times: that unbearable hybrid of the sensual and the divine, the language of sufis, Hasids, and mystics everywhere. This is post-reform Al Green, returned to his gospel roots and the rapture of divine love, expressing the kind of anguished, ecstatic longing that most of us only experience in the carnal realm. Teach on, Reverend. Everything is everything, and maybe some things are universal after all.
by Megan MatthewsLabels: holidays, megan
posted by Alex
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