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Wednesday, February 20, 2008
STOMP DOWN SOUL (SON OF A SON OF A SLAVE)
Larry Darnell
Instant : 1968
Available on: The Instant & Minit Story
Charly : 2005
[Buy It]
The kick-ass "Stomp Down Soul," by Larry Darnell, is one of the very, very few songs, sung by an African American, which references "the peculiar institution" directly (rap's a different story, which I'm not going into today.) Lately, I've been hitting the history books, trying to figure out why....
Visiting a Georgia plantation in 1839, the British actress Fanny Kemble noted that "many of the masters and overseers… prohibit melancholy tunes or words… and encourage nothing but cheerful music and senseless words, deprecating the effect of sadder strains upon the slaves, whose peculiar musical sensibility might be expected to make them especially excitable by any songs of a plaintive character, and having any reference to their particular hardships." This, she noted, was "a judicious precaution enough."
In this respect at least, West Indian slaves - who were treated more brutally than their American counterparts, and worked to death in a matter of years - had the advantage. "The bread is the flesh of the white man, San Domingo," the slaves on a plantation in Trinidad sang, a quarter-century after the Haitian revolution:The wine is the blood of the white man, San Domingo!
We will drink the white man's blood, San Domingo!
The bread we eat is the white man's flesh.
The wine we drink is the white man's blood Well over a century later, in America, Sam Cooke couched his protest in the form of a biblical allegory:
A CHANGE IS GOING TO COME
Sam Cooke
Ain't That Good News
RCA : 1963
[Buy It]
Compare that song to "Slave Driver," in which Bob Marley described the New World as "only machine for making money," and demanded justice in the here-and-now:
SLAVE DRIVER
Bob Marley & The Wailers
Live on KSAN : 1973
Available on: Talkin' Blues
Island : 1991
[Buy It]
If Cooke was essentially supplicant, Marley predicted a harsh reckoning for defenders of the old order: "Slave driver," he sang, in the present tense and second-person singular. "You're gonna get burned."
But, of course, Bob Marley grew up in Jamaica.
There are lots of covers of "A Change is Gonna Come": Aretha Franklin turned the song into a eulogy for Cooke himself (it's one of the few Aretha covers which doesn't begin to hold a candle to the original). The Supremes, Bettye Swann, The Meditations, and Solomon Burke also covered "A Change is Gonna Come," with varying degrees of success:
A CHANGE IS GONNA COME
Solomon Burke
c. 1969
Available on: Proud Mary : The Bell Sessions
Sundazed : 2000
[Buy It]
Baby Huey turned the song into a long, psychedelic scream:
A CHANGE IS GONNA COME
Baby Huey
The Baby Huey Story: The Living Legend
Water : 1971
[Buy It]
And there's even a clip of Bob Dylan—whose "Blowin' in The Wind" inspired Cooke to write "A Change is Going to Come"—covering "A Change is Going to Come." But the only version I know which tops Cooke's own is by Otis Redding. A few years down the line, the song becomes deeper, and more desperate: Redding cuts the lyrics in half, changes the refrain to "a change has gotta to come," and strips the song's codes down to their essence: "You know and I know/You know that I know/And I know that you know/That a change is gonna come," he sings:
CHANGE GONNA COME
Otis Redding
Otis Blue: Otis Redding Sings Soul
Stax : 1966
[Buy It]
As I was saying, songs rooted in the spirituals were arguments by analogy (almost without fail, to the Hebrews in old Pharaoh-land). If anything, the poetic charge of songs rooted in old, Africa-American idioms derives, in part, from the requirement to argue by analogy, and the slippage which ensued. And the tendency to argue by analogy never quite disappeared: After all, "A Change is Gonna Come" was a direct descendant of "Go Down, Moses" (which Megan Matthews wrote about in her very first Moistworks post). As it happens, Megan (who was black) thought of her life (and death) in similar terms: "When I get down, I think of myself as Moses, who survived the sojourn in the desert, but never made it to the promised land," she wrote. "That's a very sad thought for me. But a lot of my ancestors had to content themselves with living for the next generations....even if I Iose hope for myself, there is still a point to all this work."
Of course, the argument by analogy cuts both ways: If songs about American slavery pretended to be songs about other things, then songs about other things were often presented as songs about slavery/forced labor/bondage of one sort or another:
CHAIN GANG
Sam Cooke
Live at The Harlem Square Club, 1963
RCA : 1963
[Buy It]
CHAIN GANG
Otis Redding
The Soul Album
Stax : 1966
[Buy It]
BACK ON THE CHAIN GANG
The Pretenders
EMI : 1982
Learning to Crawl
EMI : 1984
[Buy It]
CHAINS
The Cookies
Dimension : 1962
Available on: The Complete Cookies
Sequel : 1994
[Buy It]
CHAINED
Marvin Gaye
In The Groove
Tamla : 1968
Available on: The Master: 1961-1984
Motown : 1995
[Buy It]
HEY!
The Pixies
Doolittle
4AD : 1989
[Buy It]
CHAIN OF FOOLS (UNEDITED VERSION)
Aretha Franklin
Lady Soul
Atlantic : 1968
[Buy It]
Oddly, American songs which do reference slavery directly tend to be sung by white folks: The Rolling Stones (who weren't Amercan, but certainly played American music) recorded the outrageously good, absurdly insensitive "Brown Sugar," and included a song called "Slave" on their 1981 album Tattoo You.
SLAVE [INSTRUMENTAL]
The Rolling Stones
c. 1981
[Unreleased Outtake]
Then there's Alex Chilton's cover of "Lorena, The Slave" which Chilton learned from an old Carter Family tape, and played with the such glee that I was reminded of his producer, Jim Dickinson's, observation that racism—holding the black music you were playing in contempt, and (by extension) playing with a healthy dose of spite and self-loathing—was always an essential component of rockabilly. But, for a minstrel song - which is what "Lorena" is - it has remarkably compassionate moments. SFJ would call me a racist, but see for yourselves:
LORENA, THE SLAVE
The Delmore Brothers
Available on: Classic Cuts: 1933-1941
JSP : 2004
[Buy It]
NO MORE THE MOON SHINES ON LORENA
The Carter Family
Available on: The Carter Family: 1927-1934
JSP : 2002
[Buy It]
NO MORE THE MOON SHINES ON LORENA
Alex Chilton
Like Flies on Sherbert
Peabody : 1980
[Buy It]
All of this seems long-ago, but it isn't really. Mauritania, which gained its independence in 1960, still has hundreds of thousands of slaves - it's only an especially extreme example. Also in 1960, Ed Murrow made a documentary called "Harvest of Shame," about migrant workers in Florida - it's not on YouTube, but you can order the documentary itself, here. It contains the following exchange with a black migrant worker (white migrants in the film are about as well off):Q: Elaine, how old are you?
A: 29
Q: How many children do you have?
A: 14
Q: How old were you when you first started working in the fields?
A: 8
Q: You've been working 21 years in the fields?
A: That's right.
Q: Elaine, do you ever think you'll be able to get out of this kind of work?
A: No, sir. For all intents and purposes, Angola - "the farm," or "bloodiest prison in the South" - was (and, in some respects, remains) an old-school plantation; in 1952, thirty-one prisoners cut their own Achilles tendons to protest conditions there....
PICKIN' COTTON ALL DAY LONG
Creola & Ceola Smith
c. 1959
Available on: Angola Prison Worksongs
Arhoolie : 1997
[Buy It]Labels: alex, slavery
posted by Alex
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