Big Sound Saturdays: People Get Ready!

During the civil rights movement, Pete Seeger’s “We Shall Overcome,” Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind,” and Buffy Sainte-Marie’s “Universal Soldier” sparked white and some black antiwar and anti-segregation sentiment. These are the songs that we tie, rightfully, to the movement. Yet it was the driving, ecstatic harmonies of Martha Reeves and the Vandellas and Smokey Robinson and the Miracles that spoke most directly to the power of black music and black art, and it was the sounds of “sweet soul music” that drove the black movements forward. It’s upon these foundations that this week’s mix, People Get Ready, is built.

Released in the summer of 1964 amidst violent protests, KKK terrorism, and the beginning of Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s Summer Project, Martha Reeves and the Vandellas’ “Dancing in the Street” topped the Billboard 100. Even though the frontwoman denied, consistently, the viability of a political re-reading of the tune, its topical reconfiguration was a call to action. In the New Yorker, Rollo Romig describes how the song was first articulated explicitly within the black power movement:

In October, 1965, the S.N.C.C. member Roland Snellings wrote an article called “Keep on Pushin’: Rhythm & Blues as a Weapon” for a black-power journal called Liberator: “WE ARE COMING UP! WE ARE COMING UP! And it’s reflected in the Riot-song that symbolized Harlem, Philly, Brooklyn, Rochester, Paterson, Elizabeth; this song, of course, ‘Dancing in the Streets’—making Martha and the Vandellas legendary.”

It’s a little apocryphal to call any of the songs that I put on People Get Ready “riot songs,” though I do think that there’s something to be said for Snellings, the black power movement, and the civil rights movement’s re-reading of them. Until the protest movements of the 1960s, interpretations of the racist, oppressive social structure were fixed—it took some creative reconsideration to open the possibility of a new order. When the remedy seems impossible, creativity might be the only thing left. “Dancing in the Street” may not intend its call to action, but it still lauded protesting at a slant. Aretha Franklin’s “Respect,” performed on this mix by Otis Redding, demanded a romance on equal terms, and it also demanded a romance of equality, and a context of equal rights.

Lots of the songs on People Get Ready are more explicit, informed directly by the civil and black rights movements: The Impressions’ timeless “People Get Ready,” the quiet bombast that marks Jackie Wilson’s “When Will Our Day Come,” Chuck Berry’s surprising hip-shaker, “Brown Eyed Handsome Man.” Most of the songs that I pulled together were, at their time, incredibly popular. Mahalia Jackson was Martin Luther King, Jr.’s favorite singer, and Trouble of the World sounded the struggle of the black population in a way reminiscent of the hopeful blues of the twenties and thirties, “the sun’s gonna shine in my back door someday.” Nina Simone is still considered to be one of the most dexterous and fearless advocates of black empowerment. With those, I also slid in a few smaller tunes: R&B great Big Maybelle’s “Heaven Will Welcome You Dr. King,” released just after his assassination as a B-side to her cover of Eleanor Rigby off the small Rojac label, is an extravagant and little-known tribute to the leader, and Dock Reed and Vera Ward Hall’s “Free At Last,” a tune whose roots stretch to early slave songs. When these tunes weren’t explicit—“be black, baby” didn’t always top the charts—they read beauty and power into a black population whose agency was overwhelmingly repudiated, if not simply ignored.

Today, that denial persists. A week ago, June 17, 2015, Dylann Roof walked into Charleston’s historically black Emanuel AME and shot and killed nine black church members: Cynthia Hurd, Susie Jackson, Ethel Lance, DePayne Middleton Doctor, Clementa C. Pinckney, Tywanza Sanders, Daniel L. Simmons Sr., Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, and Myra Thompson. You can already find lots of good writing on black mourning and forgiveness, the space of white women and black women in a racist social structure, and on the significance, in this context, of Roof’s confederate flag. We have to keep talking about this, name the dead, attribute the violence again and again to the white supremacist social structure that reproduces it. Understanding that the U.S. is built on slavery and capitalism makes these crimes legible. If we don’t keep repeating ourselves then we, and everyone else, might start to forget.

Let’s keep these songs close, then, mix them with Kendrick Lamar’s opus To Pimp A Butterfly and D’Angelo’s reckless and brilliant Black Messiah and hope that something comes out of them. There’s no point in talking if we don’t listen, too.

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Big Sound Saturdays: Ladies First, Sister Soul vol. 2, Oh Mama (Afro-Caribbean Beats)

Not sure if y’all missed this, but on April 9^th, Obama paid the first presidential visit in 32 years to Jamaica, immediately visited the Bob Marley Museum, and opened his speech to a crowd of students at the University of the West Indies with a cloying patois, “Wah Gwan Jamaica?”. Leaving aside the politics of Obama’s attempt to divert trade from Venezuela, his role in the distribution of liquid natural gas, and, less seriously, his statement upon first setting foot at the museum— “Yes. This is it! Bob Marley”—Obama’s role-play might actually bring us into a deeper history of exchange between American music—particularly blues, gospel, and soul—and Caribbean, particularly Jamaican, sound.

For this second installment of Sister Soul, M.H. and I collaborated on an Afro-Caribbean “Ladies First,” mixing her choices, contemporary Soca and heavy Trinidadian dance beats, with the tunes I’ve pulled from across Africa (bless you, Awesome Tapes From Africa) and high-life Jamaica. It took a long-time ex-boyfriend’s reggae obsession to make me realize how innovative and heart-shaking ‘60’s and ‘70’s reggae stars were in their recreation of American soul and gospel music—see Phyllis Dillon’s “Picture on the Wall,” à la Patsy Cline’s “She’s Got You”—and lots of these songs seem like they come straight from the Jamaican ether. Cum Nora Dean: “He’s got barbwire in his underpants.”

M.H. and I wanted this mix to be big and new, so it’s full of stuff that people still dance to: Destra Garcia’s 2013 hit, “Call My Name,” for one, or Patrice Roberts’ banger, “Do Wuh Yuh Want.” We’ve also got classics, Sister Nancy’s “Transfer Connection” and Patra’s “Queen of the Pack,” with the biting, lolling invective, “look how me cute and sexy like that,” that reminds me of The Breeders’ furious plea, “do you love me now?” This mix is full of African rhythms pulled by Awesome Tapes’ cassette collection, the comically bored “Jam It” and Congolese rhumba singer Mbilia Bel’s heavy-hitting 90’s R&B inflected Manzil Manzil, and rounds out Accran musician Jojo Abot’s “To Li” bass/falsetto dreamscape. Sister Soul lives!

Big Sound Saturdays: The Big Heavy

Without either the disposable income of long-lived, financially successful adulthood, or the manly inclination to “understand” by owning, record collecting has always felt like a far-off impossibility for me. I’m grateful to the men—and in the old-time world, they’re men almost exclusively—who perform this kind of labor, and I do think that these recordings couldn’t exist without them. Folk music archives have a fraught history, but thank goodness they have a history to begin with.

Without Deben Bhattacharya, we wouldn’t have “Mahour,” the Iranian folk song I’ve nestled between the Yogyakartan jam “Hai Clum Dong” (almost definitely sung by two very groovy kids) and Elliott Smith’s touching cover of, surprisingly, Hank Williams Jr. (aka “Bocephus,” of this and this reprehensible fame), the lilting “All My Rowdy Friends Have Settled Down.” Without ethnomusicologist, photographer, composer, and artist Jack Body, “Hai Clum Dong” never would’ve been recorded and released. The same for “Sea Lion Woman,” the funky children’s game song performed by Katharine and Christine Shipp (19 and 20 years old, respectively) and recorded by Alan Lomax in 1939. And the same for Hocine Slaoui (“Yamouia Ghanni”), recently reissued by the ethical and aesthetically with-it Dust-to-Digital label in Opika Pende: Africa at 78 RPM. Even Blind Willie Johnson, who (as I’ve mentioned before is about as famous as a country bluesman can be, and Abner Jay, and Jean Ritchie, are all rooted in the legacy of archival recordings, ethnomusicological desire for American old-time and world music exotica.

My dream is for a music-sphere where we can talk about how exploitative and, often, racist, a lot of these recordings were while still locating them in their context, and understanding the impact that these recordings’ sheer existence have on today’s music. Celebrating the artist, considering the recorder. Sacasas y su Orquesta’s “Rumba Negra” is a full, dense rumba, not possible without the orientalist legacy that helped bring the performing genius Josephine Baker into the spotlight. The Dezurik Sisters, also known as the “Cackle Sisters” for their masterfully synched and disorientingly accurate chicken calls, wouldn’t be singing a song called “Birmingham Jail” if not for the history of blues music that informs the country progression and vice versa. I hope we can keep talking about this, and talking about music should always come second to listening to it. A mix, then, to start us!

In truth, I made this mix for how huge and heavy these songs are, especially next to each other. If my heart could handle listening to Tom Waits’ “Anywhere I Lay My Head” more than two or three times a year, it’d grace these ranks as well. Traditional non-American musics, first recorded in the early 20^th century onto 78 RPM discs, were almost never recorded for the reasons we’d want them to’ve been, but I hope that doesn’t mean that we should forget them.

Big Sound Saturdays: Apocalypse Sound!!

The 1940’s and ‘50’s boast such an enormous archive of atomic bomb scare songs—most of them lovingly compiled onto the Atomic Platters (“Cold War music from the Golden Age of Homeland Security”)—that it feels a little tired to loop them all into a mix that would probably end up being kind of hard to listen to. I went for apocalypses of mind and body instead, with tunes ranging from totally explicit (Elvis Costello’s “Waiting for the End of the World”) to personal disaster, the girl group Heartbeats’ self-released, organ-laden heavy-hitter “Cryin’ Inside.”

In the hopes of mixing these songs into something that sounds like an atomic explosion, this mix is a little out of my usual Big Sound Saturdays fare. Apocalypse Sound!! is loaded with garage rock, punk, riot grrl, afrobeat, rock ‘n’ roll, R&B, and some big tunes from Italy, Indonesia, and Thailand. I Giganti’s “La Bomba Atomica” is a 1960’s patchwork of low register swamp sounds and earnest falsetto, bombs in the night, and the ever-irrepressible Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’ “Frenzy” is to the tune of frantic disorientation that I’m hoping the mix will bring you, the listener, into. Barring Chance Halladay’s “13 Women”— a heavy, huge, hilarious apocalypse, like the Twilight Zone’s “Time Enough At Last” in Big Man fantasy space—everyone on here is pissed off. I even rounded it off with a song that The Red Elvises wrote for the post-apocalyptic rock ballad-cum-samurai film Six String Samurai, a furious ska boogie that dances itself all over Leonard Nimoy’s cautionary “Visit To A Sad Planet.” No holds barred in any of these songs. Paint them on your body, carve them in your walls!

Big Sound Saturdays: C-H-I-C-K-E-N vol. 2

Today, S.A. continues our journey into a beloved and weird American musical trope: the eternal chicken! 

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Welcome to feature number two of ACRO Collective’s C-H-I-C-K-E-N series; all jump blues, R&B, hot jazz, and jive. I walked into this with big dreams of ‘60’s rock and Hasil Adkins chicken-punk, but these sounds overcame me: Big Joe Turner bending “Shake, Rattle and Roll” into “Chicken and the Hawk,” Billy Ward and the Dominos with their overwrought moanings, the anthropomorphized chicken clucks of Slim & Slam! You get a real sense of the hand-holding between hot jazz and early country music from some of these tunes, particularly Zeb Turner’s chicken-ified “Walking the Floor Over You,” and the chicken even stands to usher in the early soundings of rock ‘n’ roll. Listen up for the stacked, scooping harmonic bursts in Andre Williams’ “The Greasy Chicken,” the proto-Wall of Sound bumping of “Little Chickee Wah Wah,” and take a look at Mabel Lee performing the Chicken Shack Shuffle in an on screen celebration of Tillie’s Chicken Shack, in Harlem, 1943. “A Chicken Ain’t Nothin’ But A Bird,” maybe, but this bird’s stuck with us. We owe each other this chicken dance!

Special thanks, once more, to Dave Rogers, WTJU-FM’s own Professor Bebop, for sharing many of these songs with me. Looking forward to collaboratively magnetizing the chicken ad infinitum!

Big Sound Saturdays: Sister Soul

Ladies first, there’s no time to rehearse

I’m divine and my mind expands throughout the universe

– Queen Latifah, “Ladies First”

For today’s mix, I collaborated with the inimitable M.H. to serve a broad swath of soulful, genre-spanning women: from R&B and blues to hip-hop, soul, country, reggae, and funk. Donna Summers leads us in with the radio edit of what, when she first released it as a single on Oasis Records in 1975, totalled at about sixteen minutes and fifty seconds of orgasmic moaning, the mega-hit “Love to Love You Baby.” We float on Dolly’s “Early Morning Breeze” through the melty, ecstatic harmonies of Studio One’s the Soulettes and into Mariah Carey’s timeless “Fantasy,” into what Maya reminds us is one of the best tough-girl songs of our early teens: Toni Braxton’s breakup anthem, “He Wasn’t Man Enough For Me,” and through the lyrical gymnastics of young Queen Latifah and Monie Love. No story line to chart in this mix, really: Erykah Badu plays the prophet, Denise La Salle takes no prisoners, Etta James wreaks havoc over what must be the best horn solo in soul history. A room full of strong women, singing together.

It felt so right and good to make a mix where Denise La Salle rubs shoulders with Toni Braxton, Queen Latifah, and Monie Love—where Sugarpie DeSanto can sing her pre-party dress-up hip-shaker nestled between a progenitor and a disciple, where Mariah links arms with fellow high-voiced angel Dolly Parton. In Sister Soul, Aretha Franklin answers TLC and Big Mama Thornton protects her brood, excoriating the man trying to break into this sonic house of women with the righteous, enormous, “I Smell A Rat.” Maya and I have more rooms to fill with female musicians—stay tuned!

Big Sound Saturdays: Soft Steps (Music for Sleep)

A few years ago, I learned the name of something I’ve experienced my whole life. The irresistible warm tingling on the back of my head and around my ears that I get, rarely, from an older woman speaking softly—in middle school, my friend’s mom describing her teaching job, a waitress explaining the specials at my high school haunt, one of my many post-college female bosses describing spreadsheets. It has a name, which Andrea Seigel describes with very relatable awe on This American Life: “autonomous sensory meridian response,” nonsexual euphoria. Existing, without question, anecdotally, ASMR lacks real scientific substance. It’s a pleasure connection that we’ve yet to codify. There’s a reassuring connection, I think, between the group of people who feel this and listeners. Call it disparate communities, alone together, and think of how hard it is to describe why sound makes you feel things. Not silly—important, and this is a mix to prove it.

Sonic softness, warmth and light and jingling bells, is oft-sought and under-actuated in folk music. It’s easy for a sound to become burdened by its progenitor’s emotionality, and if there’s anything I hate it’s a sappy folk song. These sleep sounds, culled from American and some Caribbean recordings from the late 1920s up through the late 1960s, have this “unbearable lightness.” Autoharp and ukulele and lots of a capella—Zora Neale Hurston play-singing “Bama Bama” during her ethnographic trip to Haiti in 1937, take note!—fall in and out of each other, a patchwork for rest.
In lots of ways, they’re strange together. The Pinder Family has Bahamian folk hero Joseph Spence, whose verse acrobatics entered the American pantheon by way of an American tour in 1978 and a slew of covers by the likes of Ry Cooder and the Grateful Dead. “The Genial Hawaiians” were borne of the Hawaiian culture craze that came into its own just around 30 years after Queen Lili’uokalani was forced to abdicate her throne in the face of American colonial invasion. There’s still no official agreement—no science!—on what exactly to call the instrument that Washington Phillips made to accompany himself in the sixteen extant recordings he made for Columbia Records between 1927 and 1929. And Alan Lomax sent Blind Willie Johnson’s “Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground” in a capsule into outer space so that aliens might know what the world is capable of. There’s Cajun and British folk songs, American ballads and gospel jubilations. Plenty to curl up with. Happy Saturday night.

Special thanks to the preservers of many of these songs: Dust-to-Digital, Joe Bussard, the Association for Cultural Equity, Chris King. Songs may not have a science, but they always come from somewhere. These archivists, collectors, and re-issuers are committed to preserving the memory of these artists.

Big Sound Saturdays: Heartbreak Playlist

Editor’s note: We’re really excited about this recurring feature from the brilliant S.A., where every week she offers us a playlist culled from the best of American folk, country, blues, and more, along with a brief guide/introduction. So sit back, pour yourself a glass of whiskey, and hit play. 

In a memorable segment for “This American Life” (here), Sarah Vowell names Johnny and June Carter Cash’s abiding romance “the greatest love story of the 20th century.” Borne of the single most famous family in Country music history, June Carter was already married when she met Cash backstage at the Grand Ole Opry—the same Cash who was addicted to pills and liquor, who dreamed one night of the hellish mariachi horns he arranged into Carter’s lyrical “Ring of Fire,” who she was to marry and leave a clean, happy, Christian life with, who was buried next to her just shy of four months after her death.

“Oh What A Good Thing We Had” is nestled in the middle of Johnny and June’s first joint album, Carryin’ On with Johnny Cash and June Carter, released seventh months before their marriage and boasting a cover of Dylan’s “It Ain’t Me, Babe” and the raucous love song “Jackson.” The guitar jingles mime the platitudes Johnny and June croon to one another—“sunshine and showers” punctuating the “milk and honey”-essence of their love—except sung in the minor, notes descending, “gone bad.” Itself a great American tragedy, Oh What A Good Thing We Had sings as an in-joke with a punch-line occluded by the glitz of Country stardom and grime of country outlaws—a “long walk by the river” whose lead-up and fall-down we’ll never really get to know.

American music is at its best when it begs us to dance through our tragedies. Loneliness is borne not just from Dolly Parton’s child-killing tragedy ballads or Memphis Minnie’s plaintive moaning in “Crazy Crying Blues,” but from the Everly Brothers’ irreverent “Bye Bye Love,” the cloying “Tears on My Pillow” (sung by Little Anthony and the Imperials, who are memorialized not only by Olivia Newton John in Grease, but also by great American mythmaker Tom Waits in “Christmas Card from a Hooker in Minneapolis”), in the friendly intimation of the Girls of the Golden West: “oh darling, you’re breaking my heart.”

Bessie Banks reincarnates this deep-down heartbreak with her invective “Go Now,” where Barbara George taunts it, Waylon Jennings deflates it, and the great and powerful Linda Ronstadt refuses it outright. Already sanctioned a country classic by the time Gram Parsons performed it with the Burrito Brothers in 1969, “When Will I Be Loved” is usually a song of bombast; insistent, insolent, and really, really loud. Gram Parsons singing that tune is like Sonic Youth covering The Carpenters’ “Superstar”—he pleads with a jagged sadness that harbors the old defiance of the Country classics. It’s this veneer, this Johnny-and-June-jingle, that makes you want to move.