My People
In his too-brilliant-to-be-dismissed collection of essays bloodbeats: vol. 1, Los Angeles cultural critic Ernest Hardy writes that "selling blackness is permissible in the mainstream marketplace; celebrating it is not. Few folks know the difference." The occasion for Hardy's observation was the release of the music video for Janet Jackson's "Got Till It's Gone," of which he writes that the video "not only works the artfulness and artsiness that lie at the heart of everyday blackness but envisions a world of African cool, eroticism and playfulness that is electrifying in its forthrightness." "Got Till It's Gone" was released a decade ago and Hardy's argument is no less true today. Indeed blackness seems an industry unto itself, accessible on myriad media platforms and as pervasive as the air; there's rarely a moment where one can't conceivable choke on blackness--especially as the remote surfs past another reality show under-written by the Viacom Corporation. But where does one celebrate blackness at this moment?
There's little doubt that this was a question that Edward Kennedy Ellington--The Duke--confronted most of his adult life and throughout a musical career that spanned 50 years until his death in 1974. Being "on the road" was one of the definitive metaphors of Ellington's career--he took the music to the people, often 200 nights a year. The sheer volume of the volume music Ellington produced, often with collaborators like Billy Strayhorn, suggests that he always carried the people and their blackness close to him. With songs like "Sophisticated Lady," "Mood Indigo," "Take the 'A' Train," "Satin Doll," and "Come Sunday" Duke Ellington created a space within American society to publically love black people, a fact he always reinforced during performances when he often said to the crowd "We love you madly." And while his audiences at the peak of his career were often integrated, many of his black fans intuitively understood the phrase as a gesture of love towards them.
As a black man of relative privilege who lived through the transition from Jim Crow segregation to the racial détente that was integration, Ellington was always careful to put his fame--his genius--into the broader context of black life. So with a gem like "Heritage" (subtitled, "My Mother, My Father" and featuring Jimmy McPhail on vocals) Ellington makes the emphatic point: "In me you see, the least of the family tree personality. I was raised in the palm of the hand of the very best people in the land." And Ellington extended that logic with the song "My People" which bravely made the claim that his people--black people--were the literal soul of America. In the song's spoken word introduction, Ellington states, "My people...talking about freedom. Workin'. Building America into the most powerful nation in the world. Cotton. Sugar. Indigo. Iron. Coal. Peanuts. Steel. The railroad, you name it--the foundation of the United States rests on the sweat of My People!"
Angie Stone's recent summoning of Ellington's spirit, via her own refashioning of "My People" (with help from James Ingram) brings into focus how critical Ellington's work was more than 50 years ago. Using Ellington's own introduction to introduce her version, the lyrics to Stone's "My People" traffic in tried-and-true racial uplift-isms ("my people rise, my people fight") but the song's brilliance is conveyed by the simple gesture of naming the names aloud. And when those utterances venture beyond black history month staples--often literally stapled on school bulletin boards--to include names like Vernon Johns, Dorothy Dandridge, Mahailia Jackson, Sugar Ray Robinson, Nat King Cole, Johnnie Cochran, Cuba Gooding Jr, Gregory Hines, Zadie Smith, Romare Bearden, Count Basie, Sidney Poitier, Barack Obama, Shirley Caesar, Moms Mabley, Richard Pryor, Nikki Giovanni, Biggie Smalls, Charlie Parker, Angela Davis, Dick Gregory, Langston Hughes, Charles White, Susan Taylor, Tiger Woods and even the Rutgers Women's Basketball team, one sees how expansive black culture can be and how little of it is seemingly available to us in the current marketplace formation.
Instead we're left to parse less-than-profound options like choosing between Kanye or Curtis, or street lit and Terri McMillian (who we were chastised for choosing over Gloria Naylor and Alice Walker a decade ago). Stone's "My People" is a reminder that blackness is so much larger than the marketplace will ever allow and it's with the same passion that Ellington stayed on the road celebrating the culture that we now need to seek it out.
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