by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
On Wednesday, June 24 at 8
p.m. I watched an unusual presentation on ABC-TV, a rerun of a show they’d done
3 ½ years ago on the opening of the Smithsonian Institution’s Museum of
African-American History, hosted (or at least introduced) by Oprah Winfrey and
held at the Kennedy Center in December 2016) with the rather awkward title Taking
the Stage: African-American Music and the Stories That Changed America. It was originally broadcast on ABC January 12,
2017 — eight days before Donald Trump took over from Barack Obama as President
— and Barack and Michelle Obama were in the Presidential box, sometimes
clapping and singing along. Not only did the sight of the Obamas in full
Presidential regalia make me nostalgic for the days when we had a President not
only of professional competence but personal integrity as well, it was amazing
to see him recite the words as rapper Chuck D. of the pioneering group Public
Enemy said, “Fight the Power!” (Actually one could imagine Donald Trump having
similar sentiments, but his idea of “The Power” is the “Deep State” of
Right-wing imagining, that collection of civil servants who faithfully serve
Presidents of both major parties and therefore mark them as worthy purge
targets under Trump’s Gleichschaltung.) The show opened with a brief snippet of a tribute to James Brown and
then went into a salute to Harlem in the 1920’s and 1930’s, with Jon Batiste
(Stephen Colbert’s music director), Patti Austin and the spectacular tap dancer
Savion Glover doing Cab Calloway’s “The Jumpin’ Jive” and Duke Ellington’s
(actually Billy Strayhorn’s) “Take the ‘A’ Train.” The versions heard on this
show were considerably louder and more raucous than the originals — a recurring
problem throughout the program (Donald Vroon, editor-publisher of the American
Record Guide, wrote in his current
July-August 2020 issue that just about all music, including “classical” music, is getting louder because “[t]he
pop composers have adapted to the fact that you have to make a big impression
in the first 30 seconds”) — but still a lot of fun.
Then there was an odd
tribute to Marian Anderson’s famous concert on the steps of the Lincoln
Memorial in 1939 (held outdoors because the originally slated venue, ironically
called Constitution Hall, was owned by the Daughters of the American Revolution
and they refused to allow a Black performer to appear there; Eleanor Roosevelt
resigned her DAR membership in protest — good for her! — and she and Harold
Ickes, Roosevelt’s Secretary of the Interior, arranged for the outdoor concert
in its place) in which they gave the assignment to sing Anderson’s opening song
from the concert, “My Country, ’Tis of Thee,” not to one of the
African-American singers who have successfully made their careers in opera and
classical music after Anderson broke the color line, but to … Mary J. Blige.
Actually Blige’s rendition, though it had nothing to do with Anderson’s sort of
music, was a beautiful bit of soul singing — but one wishes the show had done
more for the long history of Black singers in classical music. (One name I
discovered almost by accident via an online reproduction of a Paramount Records
ad was Florence Cole Talbert, Marian Anderson’s voice teacher and a huge talent
in her own right: she recorded the Bell Song from Delibes’ Lakmé and brought more power, mystery and drama to that
hackneyed aria than anyone I can think of besides Maria Callas — no doubt just
one of many great voices kept by racism from having the sort of career she
deserved. Hear it yourself at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=56kd69bBmlw
and see if you don’t agree with me.)
The next number was Gary Clark, Jr. and
the Alvin Ailey Dance Theatre paying a tribute to the blues, with Clark doing a
couple of choruses of Muddy Waters’ “Rollin’ Stone” (though not, alas, the
final chorus that gave the Rolling Stones their name) and the Ailey troupe
doing a short excerpt of their famous ballet Revelations that included “Wade in
the Water” and “Didn’t My Lord Deliver Daniel!” with two women in white dresses
and a blessedly topless male cavorting on stage in a dance that didn’t have
much to do with the blues but was still a lot of fun (and the man was tall,
slender and incredibly agile — he reminded me of Earl “Snake Hips” Tucker in the 1935 Duke Ellington short film Symphony
in Black). The next number was an
odd combination of singer-guitarist Dave Grohl (who I think was the only white
performer on the bill) and someone or something called “Troublefunk” doing a
cover of Jimi Hendrix’ “Crosstown Traffic” which was so far off base from the
original I didn’t recognize it at first. The next number was a cover of Aretha
Franklin’s “Dr. Feelgood” by the modern singer Fantasia, whose voice lies
higher than Aretha’s did but she understood the style and embraced it
effectively. Then Usher did a four-song tribute to James Brown — “Papa’s Got a
Brand New Bag” (with that killer guitar lick that impressed me no end when I
was growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area in the late 1960’s; while the
white psychedelic-rock bands seemed to be trying to make a virtue of
sloppiness, these Black musicians were perfectly disciplined and played tightly
together), “I Feel Good,” “Say It Loud (I’m Black and I’m Proud)” and “Sex Machine.”
I wish he’d done “Say It Loud” last, and Usher isn’t as rough and searing in
his energy as the original, but it was a good tribute and, though he doesn’t
move the way Brown did, he’s agile and flexible when he dances.
Then there was
an odd tribute to the great Black jazz singers — introduced by the odd
statement that the only place you could go to hear them was Black nightclubs,
which flatly wasn’t true: the three singers represented, Billie Holiday, Lena
Horne and Sarah Vaughan, all played venues in the white community (in 1939
Billie headlined at Café Society, the first New York nightclub with an
integrated audience), featuring Christina Aguilera, Cynthia Erivo and someone I
didn’t recognize whose name, as best I could make it out from a hurriedly barked-out
announcement, was “Renée Elise Goldspell.” Ms. Whatever-Her-Name-Is kicked off
the proceedings with “Misty,” a jazz instrumental by Erroll Garner to which
lyrics were added later for Sarah Vaughan to sing (though Johnny Mathis had the
hit — unfortunately, since he simply didn’t understand Garner’s modern-jazz
world the way Sarah did), followed by Erivo doing Billie Holiday’s “God Bless
the Child” and Aguilera tearing her way through “Stormy Weather.” This was
offered as a tribute to Horne, though before she sang it in a 1943 musical of
that title it had been introduced over 10 years earlier by Ethel Waters at the
Cotton Club — and of course I lamented the great Black singers they weren’t paying tribute to, including Waters, Ella
Fitzgerald and the incomparable Dinah Washington. (As great as Aretha Franklin
was, she didn’t do anything Dinah hadn’t done first — and there were things
Dinah could do that Aretha never could, like sing jazz.) The show then veered
into tributes to African-American athletes (notably boxers Joe Louis and
Muhammad Ali) and Blacks in the U.S. military: there was a moving on-stage
reunion of the six surviving Tuskegee Airmen and a story about how they had to
fight their war in their own all-Black unit because the U.S. military was still
segregated. During the war the NAACP launched a campaign called the “Double V,”
which meant victory in World War II and victory against racism at home, and one
little-known fact about the explosion of African-American civil rights activism
in the 1950’s and 1960’s was that a lot of Black veterans, having returned home
from a war in which they were nominally fighting for freedom and against
racism, came home to the same old racist crap they’d been dealing with before.
It would have been nice, however,
if someone on the show had mentioned that World War II was the last U.S. war in which Black servicemembers had to
fight in segregated units: in 1948 President Harry Truman issued an executive
order desegregating the U.S. military, and he used a lot of political capital
to make sure it stuck.
Afterwards there was a salute to Black stand-up
comedians, featuring Jackie “Moms” Mabley (an amazing performer from whom
Whoopi Goldberg ripped off almost all her act), Dick Gregory, Nipsey Russell,
Redd Foxx, Richard Pryor and Eddie Murphy. Once again I was annoyed by who wasn’t included — I wasn’t really expecting a mention of
Bill Cosby because he’s been “unpersonned” after the successful conviction of
him on date-rape charges, but what about Godfrey Cambridge (whose joke about
how he could never buy a flesh-colored Band-Aid — “They don’t come in my flesh color!” — has been repeated recently by
Black Lives Matter supporters) or Flip Wilson? Then the music resumed with one
of the original performers who’s not only alive but whose voice was as good as
ever, Gladys Knight, heard on “Midnight Train to Georgia” and “I Heard It
Through the Grapevine.” I’ve made this point many times before but it bears
repeating: the great Black soul voices were not “untrained.” They were trained as children in
Black church choirs by the choir directors, who drilled them in the basics of
singing soul — which requires as disciplined a vocal technique as singing
opera. The chief victims of the myth of the “untrained” Black soul voice have been
white singers who’ve believed it and thought that all you had to do to sing
soul was stand in front of a band and scream. Janis Joplin’s career would not
have lasted much longer than it did even if she’d lived — it’s all too obvious
from her surviving performances on records and film how she was destroying her
voice — and we’ve heard what trying to sing soul without the proper training
can do to white women’s voices with people like Bonnie Tyler and Stevie Nicks.
After Gladys Knight’s performance — easily the musical highlight of the evening
— John Legend came out with his familiar tribute to Marvin Gaye, doing “What’s
Goin’ On?” acceptably but without the searing power of Gaye’s original.
Then
there was another high point, Herbie Hancock representing all of Black jazz
(which, of course, was an impossible task for just one person), playing his
star-making 1962 hit “Watermelon Man” first on a standard piano, then on a
synthesizer and finally on one of those instruments that cross-breeds a
keyboard and a guitar, so keyboard players can come out from behind their
instruments and hop and bop on stage just like guitar players. After that was a section I found surprisingly moving: a
tribute to rap (or “hip-hop,” which is what you call it if you like it) that
began with Common reciting a poem by Langston Hughes, then segued into Chuck D.
from Public Enemy doing “Fight the Power” and Doug E. Fresh reciting “Give It
All You Got.” A surprising number of people in the auditorium, including
then-President Obama, knew the words well enough to recite along with them, and
though the performers started doing drum-machine impressions towards the end,
for the most part I found the performance moving because I actually got to hear
the words of these pieces without the cacophonous din that usually goes on
behind them and drowns many of them out. (I’ve said a lot of nasty things about
rap over the years, and one of them is that if you’re going to eliminate melody
and harmony from music and reduce it to just lyrics and rhythm, the very least
you can do for your audience is make it possible to understand the words.)
Next
came the long-overdue tribute to Black Gospel music — which is really where the
roots of it are: all
African-American music (which has really been most or all of the world’s
popular music since ragtime, and then jazz, exploded in the early 20th
century) comes from spirituals and gospel. The performers included Shirley
Caesar, Mary Melle, Donnie McClurkin and the Howard University Gospel Choir,
and while the music was contemporary instead of traditional gospel, it was
excellent and Caesar took charge with a song called “I’m Going There.” For me
the show could have ended right there, but the producers had one more
formidable talent to present: Stevie Wonder, who led the finale. At first I was
puzzled that Wonder — who began his performance by saying, “Tomorrow our
children will make history — at least those who survive,” driving home the
Black Lives Matter message with the force and precision of a stiletto — did the
song “Love’s in Need of Love,” a nice piece but one which had me thinking,
“Hey, Stevie, why not something more anthemic, like ‘Higher Ground’ or ‘Sir
Duke’?” Then he did do
“Higher Ground” and it became the big finale on which the rest of the cast
joined in. Taking the Stage was for the most part a quite remarkable program — though I suspect one
reason ABC-TV dredged up this 3 ½-year old show was that CBS is doing something
similar, with some of the same performers, tomorrow night, Sunday, June 28 —
and despite my nit-picking about the great Black artists and entertainers who weren’t mentioned it was a worthy tribute to the depth and
scope of the African-American culture the Smithsonian’s new museum is honoring.
