I had a conversation about music recently with a white friend, a āfolkieā who annually attends the folk music festivals thatĀ take place frequently here in the northeastern part of the United States. We were talking about the annual Clearwater Festival held in New York, which is not happening in 2020Ā due to a combination of financial issues and COVID-19. My friend mentioned that they rarely saw any Black people at these festivals, hypothesizing thatĀ āperhaps thatās because most folk singersĀ and banjo players are white.ā
I did a bit of a double-take, because I hadnāt thought of folk music that wayāprobably because I grew up surrounded by folk music and folk musicians of all colors, many of whom were Black. Instead, I always thought of their music as inextricably entwined with the politics of protest.
So, to continue my pandemic-driven series focusingĀ on music, Iām offering a sampling ofĀ the vast repertoire that Black folk musicians have contributed,Ā both to the genreĀ and the struggleĀ for freedom and justice.
With that conversation and my own childhood in mind, I did a quick Google search for āBlack folk singers.āĀ I foundĀ a list of familiar faces, a few of whom I wouldnāt considerĀ āfolk.āĀ (Or in the case of Pete Seeger,Ā Black.) One key artistĀ was missing from the results:Ā Leon Bibb, who always let me call him by his first name as a kid, so I hope you donāt mind if I do so now. When LeonĀ died in October 2015, I wrote about his life for bothĀ Motley MooseĀ andĀ Black Kos.
I was blessed to grow up with parents who surrounded me with political activists. Among those activists were actors and musicians. When we moved to Hollis, Queens NYC when I was going into the 5th grade, a few blocks away from us was the home of friends of my parentsāLeon Bibb, his wife and children. I got to spend a lot of time in and out of that homeāthe Bibbs had twins, Eric and Dorie, four years younger than I was ,and a younger daughter Amy. Through their doors would come Paul Robeson (Ericās godfather), Theodore Bikel, Peter, Paul and Mary, and numerous other performing artists, including Leonās brother-in-law pianist and jazz composer John Lewis.
I have to thank Leonās influence for exposing me to folk music, black folk songs, as well as to white leftist singers whose music helped shape my world.
Though he has been gone from this country since 1969 when he left the U.S. for Canada, his music and the memories of my young adulthood are with me still. I only got to see him once during the intervening years. He is gone, but his music lives on.
Leon Bibb, an actor turned folk singer whose powerful, elegant baritone voice made him a prominent figure in the folk-music revival and a stirring performer at the landmark civil rights demonstrations of the 1960s, including the third march from Selma to Montgomery, Ala., in 1965, died on Friday in Vancouver, British Columbia. He was 93.
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It was the dearth of parts for black actors that motivated Mr. Bibb to remold himself as a folk singer in the mid-1950s, drawing on the spirituals that one of his aunts had sung to him as a child in Louisville, Ky. Albums like āLeon Bibb Sings Folk Songs,ā released by the Vanguard label in 1959, and frequent performances on the television show āHootenannyā made him one of the more prominent folk singers of the era. A regular at clubs like the Bitter End and the Village Gate in New York and the hungry i in San Francisco, he sang at the first Newport Folk Festival in 1959 and reached a broad television audience that same year when he sang āSinner Man,ā one of his signature songs, on āThe Ed Sullivan Show.ā
Mr. Bibb became involved in the civil rights movement early on, taking part in voter-registration drives in the South and performing at the 1963 March on Washington. In 1965 he performed in front of the statehouse in Montgomery with Joan Baez, Oscar Brand and Harry Belafonte, whom he had known since their acting days at the American Negro Theater in Harlem. āHe was really committed to the cause of civil rights, and he was hugely inspiring,ā Mr. Belafonte said in a telephone interview. āBetween him and Mahalia Jackson, we had all the music we needed for the movement.ā
This tweet about Harry BelafonteĀ may not identify theĀ young man between himĀ and Joan Baez, but the Smithsonian blog does. ThatāsĀ āHarry Belafonte, Leon Bibb, and Joan Baez singing at Selma to Montgomery March, 1965.ā
Many readers might be too young to remember Hootenanny,Ā theĀ short-livedĀ ABC TV showĀ dedicated to presenting folk music to a national audience. The show fell apart quicklyāfirst due to artist boycott when the network blacklistedĀ prominent folk artists who were under attack because of their leftist leanings, like Seeger, and later due to the rise of the British Invasion.
Hereās Leon performing āRocks & Gravelā on Hootenanny in 1963.
Leon first recorded āRocks and Gravelā in 1958. Many folk music fans are aware of a different song with the same title recorded by Bob Dylan;Ā there has been discussionĀ about the songwriter creditĀ since itās often listed as āwritten by Bob Dylanā despite the roots of many work songsĀ and chain gang songsĀ beingĀ part of a history of Black enslavement and Reconstruction era oppression.
Leonās version of āRainbow Round My Shoulderā was also a song that originated in theĀ chain gangs, as compiled by John and Alan Lomax in American Ballads and Folk Songs. Both āRocks and Gravelā and āRainbow on my Shoulderā would later be immortalized in danceĀ by famed Black choreographer Donald McKayle.
I mentioned growing up with the Bibb family, including Eric, whoĀ grew up to be twice Grammy-nominated and a well-known musicianĀ in his own right in both Europe andĀ the U.S.
Father and son recorded several albums together,Ā most notably A Family Affair.Ā Below, both generations come together to sing āSwing Low, Sweet Chariot.ā
The Bibbs also teamed up to record a tribute to Paul Robeson.Ā EricĀ offered aĀ written homageĀ in the liner notes.
Paul Robeson was my Fatherās friend and mentor both musically and philosophically. Leonās admiration of Robeson lead to Paul becoming mine and my twin Sisters Godfather. We were inspired to make this tribute album by a devise to celebrate the life and music of Paul Robeson and his great contribution to peace and brotherhood. in a time where conflict in the world has reach an all time high. āPraising Peaceā is the only way forward.ā
āTo be free – to walk the good American earth as equal citizens, to live without fear, to enjoy the fruits of our toil to give our children every opportunity in life – that dream which we have held so long in our hearts today the destiny that we hold in our hands.ā āPaul Robeson
Just days agoāMay 4ā Eric posted a tune perfect for a pandemic: āBetter Times Will Come,āĀ written byĀ Janis Ian. As Ian notes, the performance is part of a larger effort to soothe us all and keep our hope alive.
In troubled times, art is often all that stands Ā between us and chaos. In that spirit, I decided to offer a lot of “free stuff”, and invited colleagues to contribute versions of my song “Better Times Will Come.”Ā Please share with friends and social media. Everyone here hopes the downloads and videos will bring a bit of hope. Special thanks to my colleagues for allowing their work to be used! Thank you; stay safe.
Enjoy.
As I continue to consider my own Black folk music education, two other names stand out. The first is Odetta. Trained as a child in classical music, Odetta Holmes Felious would become a guardian of folk tradition and influence the course of American music. Itās hard to believe that there is only one major biography of her life: Odetta: A Life in Music and Protest.Ā Even more baffling? The book was only released last month.Ā As Josephine LivingstoneĀ asserts inĀ The New Republic, Odetta has been ālargely forgotten by younger generations.āĀ Her biography aims to addressĀ that knowledge gap.
In the video below, Odettaās performance of the āFreedom Trilogyā is set to images from her remarkable lifeāboth in music and in protest.
Peggy Bulger, director of the American Folklife Center,Ā interviewed Odetta in 2003. She talked about her early musical heroes and role models,Ā like Paul RobesonĀ and Marian Anderson, who she said ārepresented the dignity of Black women.ā Reflecting on the early part of her career, she spoke ofĀ her selection of material, noting:Ā āOne of the things that helped heal me, and the hate that I had for everything and everybody, including myself, were the prison work songs [ā¦] IĀ was able to get my rocks off, the venom out.ā In later years, Odetta remarked thatĀ as she grew as a woman and an artist, she shifted to more world musicĀ and global issues.
Take a look at theĀ listed facts and let me know which ones you didnāt know. Personally, as an early Afro wearerĀ I didnāt know my former hairstyleĀ was first named āthe Odetta.ā Christine Kelly wrote about Odettaās appearance forĀ Zapruder WorldāsĀ fourth volume ofĀ Performing Race.
Odetta appeared on stage with little but a long, plain dress and her guitar to accompany her. She stood in the center of a pool of bright light that contrasted sharply with a dark stage, forming an air of solemnity that the black-and-white medium of television broadcast made all the more pronounced. Her hair was thick and short, free of any attempts to flatten or straighten it. Later, a civil rights-inspired African ethnic beauty revival would popularize the āOdetta,ā as the hairstyle was originally called, renaming it the āAfro.ā But for now, the performer stood alone as the first household name to don such a daring do.
With eyes tightly shut, Odetta belted out the lyrics to what television critic Chestyn Everette described as the ātriumph of the eveningā: her rendition of the African-American slave and prison labor song, āWater Boy.ā āWater Boy!,ā Odetta cried, which she followed with a dramatic pause and sharp guitar strum, āWater Boy! If you donāt come right here / Gonna tell pa on you / There aināt no hammer that ring like mine, boy . . . There aināt no hammer that ring like mine.ā
No one who has ever heard Odettaās performance of āThe Waterboyā couldĀ forget it.
Odettaās obituary in TheNew York Times spoke of her importance to the movement.
Odettaās voice was an accompaniment to the black-and-white images of the freedom marchers who walked the roads of Alabama and Mississippi and the boulevards of Washington to end racial discrimination.
Rosa Parks, whose refusal to give up her seat to a white passenger led to the boycott of segregated buses in Montgomery, Ala., was once asked which songs meant the most to her. āAll of the songs Odetta sings,ā she replied.
One of those songs was āIām on My Way,ā sung during the pivotal civil-rights March on Washington on Aug. 28, 1963. In a videotaped interview with The New York Times in 2007 for its online feature āThe Last Word,ā Odetta recalled the sentiments of another song she performed that day, āOh Freedom,ā which is rooted in slavery: āOh freedom, Oh freedom, Oh freedom over me/ And before Iād be a slave, Iād be buried in my grave/ And go home to my Lord and be free.ā
If the Library of Congress video above was too long for you, watch the āThe Last Wordā feature below and listen to Odetta tell her story herself in just seven minutes.
We all know the story of Bob Dylan going electric at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival: the boos, the cheers, Pete Seeger overheard backstage wishing that he had an axe to chop through the microphone cable. Itās one of the great American artistic-origin myths. As Excalibur was to Arthur, so the Fender Stratocaster was to Dylan, the tool that unlocked a destiny. But what most of us donāt realize is that Dylan started out electric, playing with his band as a teen-ager in Minnesota. His first big musical transformation was going acoustic, moving from rock to folk, and that, as he told Ron Rosenbaum in an unusually sincere interview in a 1978 issue of Playboy, happened because of the great African-American singer Odetta.
Of course Odetta influenced Dylan. She influenced just about everybody in the folk scene.
Listen to Odetta cover Dylanās āMasters of Warā and note, asĀ The New YorkerĀ describes, how āDylanās most famous protest songs (are)Ā transformed by a woman whose lived experience was so marked by the particular brand of American injustice that Dylan had observed at a remove.ā
Like Odetta, another Black woman would be part of the civil rights movementĀ and go on to collect and disseminate Black folk music to the world:Ā Dr. Bernice Johnson Reagon, who believes strongly in the connective tissue created by music.
These days, I come as āsongtalker,ā one who balances talk and song in the creation of a live performance conversation with those who gather within the sound of my voice.
As a student leader and activist in the Albany Movement, I sang and stood in the sound of the congregational singing of the freedom songs charging the air we breathed. For the first time, I understood how the singing not only pulled us together, but became our articulate collective testimony to all who stood within the sound.
Bernice Johnson Reagon, singer, song leader, civil rights activist, and scholar, is a profound contributor to African American culture. Bernice was born in Albany, Georgia, in 1942. She recorded her first solo album, Folk Songs: The South, with Folkways Records in 1965. As she writes, “My history was wrapped carefully for me by my fore-parents in the songs of the church, the work fields, and the blues. Ever since this discovery I’ve been trying to find myself, using the first music I’ve ever known as a basic foundation for my search for truth.”
In the 1960s, Bernice was an integral part of the African American struggle for civil rights. Her work started in her hometown of Albany, where protests and marches were often accompanied by massive arrests. She found inspiration in the songs elders would sing at mass meetings and community gatherings, and music took on greater meaning for her. She writes, “As a singer and activist in the Albany Movement, I sang and heard the freedom songs, and saw them pull together sections of the Black community at times when other means of communication were ineffective. It was the first time that I knew the power of song to be an instrument for the articulation of our community concerns.”
Along with Cordell Reagon, Rutha Harris, and Charles Neblett, Bernice founded the SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) Freedom Singers, the first group of freedom singers to travel nationally. The SNCC Freedom Singers recognized that singing provided an outlet of protest for those who might normally have been intimidated by racist authority or mobs, and allowed those outside the struggle to become directly engaged.
Hereās a clip of the Freedom Singers with a powerful performance ofĀ āI Woke Up This Morning With My Mind Set On Freedom.ā
Watch the Freedom Singers captivate the crowd at the March on Washington with their rendition of āWe Shall Not Be Moved.ā
When SNCC organizers Charles Sherrod and Cordell Reagoncame to Albany in the fall of 1961, they found the students at Albany State ready for action. The two field secretaries started poking around campus, talking with students. Johnson remembered that Sherrod approached her and asked her the join SNCC. She was at first put off. āI told Sherrod that they needed to find another name for the organization ā¦ the term nonviolent did not name anything in my experience.ā But something was happening āand I didnāt want it to happen without me.ā
That November, the Albany Movement was organized in reaction to the arrests of Bertha Gober and Blanton Hall for testing the Interstate Commerce Commissionās ruling ordering the desegregation of interstate buses and trains. Johnson was now pouring almost all of her time into the local Movement. She served on the program committee, she planned meetings, and provided music. At one of the first mass meetings in Union Baptist Church, Johnson was asked to lead the participants in song. She started to sing āOver my head, I see Trouble in the Air,ā but she quickly realized that ātroubleā wasnāt the right word for the occasion. āSo instead I put in freedom and by the second line everyone was singing.ā
Johnson was suspended from Albany State for her activism. She spent a semester at Spelman College in Atlanta before joining SNCCās newly-formed Freedom Singers in 1962. She married the groupās co-founder Cordell Reagon. The Freedom Singers toured the country to raise money for SNCC projects in the Deep South. The group also moved in and out of movement hotspots, using their music to provide a spark for local activism. āBasically the singing was the ābedā and the āairā of everything,ā remembered Johnson. āI had never heard or felt singing do that on that level of power.ā In 1966, Johnson Reagon founded the Harambee Singers and in 1973, she formed Sweet Honey in the Rock, an all-women, African American a cappella group that sought to effect change and portray the Black experience through their voices. Johnson Reagon continued to use her powerful singing to allow others to study the African American oral tradition in radio, film, and concerts across the country.
The first album I ever owned that features Reagonās voiceĀ was Give Your Hands to Struggle,Ā which was recorded in 1975Ā and rereleased in 1997 by Smithsonian Folkways. I wore out several copies.
In 1977Ā I was living in Washington, D.C. I was part of putting the first Black-controlled Pacifica radio station on the air that year.Ā We had the good fortune to have a group formed by Reagon in 1973 while she was a graduate student at Howard University, Sweet Honey in the Rock,Ā come to the station and cut promos for us. We aired a lot of their music, and it remains a mainstay for me in times that are good, and when I need music to tide me over when things are rough ā¦Ā like right now.
In 1999, Dr. Reagon received the International Lifetime Achievement Award from the Folk Alliance. In this interview to commemorate the high honor,Ā she talks about the founding of Sweet Honey in the RockĀ and the key role music plays in our struggles.
I got up todayĀ thinking about the wanton murder, lynching, and slaughter of a young Black joggerĀ named Ahmaud Arbery, who was shot downĀ in Georgia by white domestic terrorists.Ā His life was taken just threeĀ days before the anniversary of the slaying of Trayvon Martin. Itās onĀ mornings like thisĀ that the words of āEllaās SongāĀ come to mind.
We who believe in freedom cannot rest
We who believe in freedom cannot rest until it comes
Until the killing of Black men, Black mothersā sons
Is as important as the killing of White men, White mothersā sons
Like Leon Bibbās son Eric, Dr. Reagonās daughterĀ has continued in the folk and protest tradition. Meet Toshi Reagon.
Iāll close with this rousing performance of āAināt Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Roundā featuring Toshi and her mom at the 2018 Smithsonian Folklife Festival.
Yes, the women use music to taunt ICE agents and decry misogyny, homophobia,Ā and transphobia, but what got me standing upĀ and shouting āamenā during thatĀ last song was Toshiās closing exhortation to the audience to join in a cappella. Itās a reminder thatĀ we can make music with our voices, and our hands, and our feet; we donāt always need to be pluggedĀ in.
The beauty and power of so much of our African-ancestored folk music is in its simplicity. Call-and-response creates community bondsāsomething we could use a lot more of these days.
Aināt gonna let nobody turn usĀ round. Can I get an amen?
Iāve barely scratched the surface of Black folk music intersections today. Since our quarantine isolation situation isnāt going away any time soonādespite DonaldĀ Trumpās stupid demands that we get back to a ānormalā that no longer existsāpleaseĀ tune in next SundayĀ for even more music along these lines. (ThoughĀ I have a feeling weāll be spending some time withĀ the folk-blues.)
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