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By Greg Thomas on Apr 26, 2021 07:24 am
There are special moments you remember from special events in life.
Last week’s conversation at the Stoa, featuring a
multi-generation array of Black women—my daughter Kaya even made a cameo appearance—was one of these moments for me. It began with love and honoring a lineage of struggle; it closed with deep appreciation and shared generosity.
In between? Sober reality leavened with radical hope and recognition of resilience, all without sparing a critique of patriarchy in Black American political movements and religious traditions.
Loretta Ross, the revered elder of the trio, was at the center of many of the special moments.
Early on, she praised Imani Perry’s work, saying, “Some writers take your breath away; Imani gives you your breath back.”
When speaking of Black feminism in relation to men: “I don’t hate men, I’m a feminist who wants better men!”
On theory into practice, aka
praxis: “Our living stories are what we develop theory behind. It’s not that reality has to meet the theory, it’s that reality develops the theory.”
When speaking of the terminology used in activism, “We didn’t invent these ideas; we invent new language, new nomenclature for them. And having named them, let’s
now attend to the work.”
To close out the session of soulful wisdom in a pivotal time, Professor Ross described the conversation as a “lovefest with some deep thinking.”
Her BFF, Dr. Toni Bond, will help us pivot to the main section of our text today. Check out her answer to the question of what she does to rejuvenate and regenerate
amid all the study and activism:
”Loretta describes me as having a quirky musical taste,” said Dr. Bond. “Music nourishes me; I like all kinds of music. From the age of 16-17 to 25, I sang professionally. That is why I like everything from Aretha Franklin to Sting to [operatic] aria.”
Such an eclectic musical taste may be quirky, but it also points to a uniquely American alchemy of musical styles.
Jamie Wheal Book Excerpt
Another special moment was the last event of the “Body and Soul: The Mind of Culture” series I co-hosted at The Stoa with Gregg Henriques in February. To my pleasant
surprise, one of the guests, Jamie Wheal, read from his book, being released this week, Recapture the Rapture: Rethinking God, Sex, and Death in a World That’s Gone Mad.
I could barely believe my ears. It’s from a section of the book called “Arcana Americana.”
Once I started connecting them, those dots crisscrossed America from Nova Scotia to Appalachia to California to Africa before popping back up in the strangest of
places--like full moon “polyethnic cajun slamgrass” tribal stomps in the mountains of Colorado and flashy headliners’ sets at Coachella and the Academy Awards.
But no matter where those dots led—tracing the catalog of the Grateful Dead, the coffee house folk music of Bob Dylan, the blues-infused revival of the British
rock invasion-- they kept coming back to a mild-mannered guy named Alan Lomax.
Lomax was a music geek who’d grown up in the early 1900’s in Austin, Texas, and bounced between Harvard and other schools before finding his vocation. He started
out by helping his father, a folklorist, get field recordings of cowboy tunes. But Alan really came into his own when he took over leadership of the Library of Congress’ Archive of Folk Song in 1937.
He lugged clunky metal-and-wax recording equipment along with him all across the country. Lomax made over ten thousand field recordings and captured the voices
and sounds of an America that most people never knew existed.
He became fascinated by "the seemingly incoherent diversity of American folk song as an expression of its democratic, inter-racial, international character.” He
interviewed the famous folk singer Woody Guthrie, and [blues] legend Big Bill Broonzy, [jazz pioneer] Jelly Roll Morton, Chicago blues icon Muddy Waters, and dozens of others.
While a meaningful number of Lomax’s recordings captured the folkways of the African American South, the music of this country really emerged as a mishmash of traditions
and influences. From the Scots-Irish Celtic tunes of hardscrabble Appalachia that grew into bluegrass and country music, to the French-Catholic fiddle strains of Acadian music that then became the Cajun zydeco of Mardi Gras. Everywhere displaced people suffered
and prevailed, these redemption songs became a way of giving point and purpose to their struggle.
“Homo Americanus is part Yankee ingenuity, part backwoodsman/Indian or gamecock of the wilderness,
and part Negro,” Albert Murray, the founder of Jazz at the Lincoln Center, said.
“The blues tradition itself is,” he wrote in The Hero and the Blues, “...the
candid acknowledgment and sober acceptance of adversity as an inescapable condition of human existence—and, perhaps in consequence, an affirmative disposition toward all obstacles...whether political or metaphysical.”
When 1920’s bluesman Furry Lewis wailed “I been down so goddamn long, it seems like up to me” he was embodying Murray’s ‘affirmative disposition’ towards the obstacles
of life. Naming it, claiming it, transcending it. Apparently, his sentiment struck a chord—everyone from Nancy Sinatra to the Doors to the hip hop superstar Drake, have all covered his song.
Murray’s protege Stanley Crouch gave a name to this balance of adversity and triumph-- swing. “It’s
that combination of grace and intensity we know as swing. In jazz, sorrow rhythmically transforms itself into joy, which is perhaps the point of the music: joy earned or arrived at through performance,
through creation.”
And that’s the thing that we’re really trying to tease apart here: that somehow, buried in this polyglot mishmash tradition of the American songbook, lies something
potentially profound. A philosophy, a way of being, a secret scripture, an arcana, that not only sheds light on where we’ve come from, but hints at a way forward for all of us.
Because these redemption songs aren’t about simply looking on the bright side of lousy situations. They’re powerful calls to radical transformation. “The question’s
not having hope,” Cornel West insisted at a lecture at Harvard Divinity School, “the question is being a hope. Having hope is still too detached, too spectatorial. You got to be a participant.
You gotta be an agent. ‘You keep on pushing’ Curtis Mayfield says. ‘Be a force for good’ Coltrane says. ‘Mississippi god damn!’ says Nina Simone. That ain’t having hope. That’s being a
hope. Courageously bearing witness regardless of what the circumstances are because you’re choosing to be a kind of person of integrity to the best of your ability before the worms get your body. Boom! that’s it. That’s blues. Beautiful tradition.”
—Jamie Wheal, from Chapter Seven,
Recapture the Rapture
Book Party
On Wednesday, April 28, I’ll be part of an array of souls celebrating the launch of Jamie’s book from 3 pm to 6pm EST. In fact, I’ll be jammin’ with Jamie and Leah
Song of Appalachia Rising about the alchemy of radical transformation represented by the blues idiom as a wisdom tradition pointing “a way forward for all of us.”
I urge you to purchase the book—which I predict will be a best-seller—and join
us on Wednesday for the party.
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