Lou Emma Holloway lecture, "The Blacks in Soul Music Lyrics During the 1960s," at the University of Iowa, June 8, 1978

Speaker 1: The following was recorded June 8th, 1978, as part of the 10th Annual Institute for Afro American Culture, held at the University of Iowa. The theme of the Institute was Black Culture in the Second Renaissance, a Study of Afro American Thought and Experience, 1954 to 1970. The Blacks in Soul Music Lyrics During the 1960s is the topic of this lecture by Lou Emma Holloway, associate professor of history at Tougaloo College. To make the introduction, here is Darwin Turner, professor of English, and Director of Afro American studies at the University of Iowa. Darwin Turner: Sunday at the banquet, I referred to the fact that our participants are scholars, and that the participants were in many instances preparing for the time when they would be outshining the lecturers. I heard a titter, and assumed that some may have taken this merely as a kind of flattery or kind statement. What I was referring to was fact. For example, one of the participants this year, Gary Hunter, was a lecturer last year. This year we have an individual who is not only a participant, but who will be a lecturer in the program this morning. The individual is Lou Holloway, who received a bachelors from Tougaloo College, a masters in history from the University of Denver, and who received a certificate indicating the completion of 30 hours of organized study beyond the masters in American studies and history at Wesleyan University. She's taught at a number of colleges, Morehouse, Grambling, Scripps College. Since 1970 she has been teaching at Tougaloo, when not engaged in activity as a visiting professor at Bowdoin or Williams or Wesleyan. Darwin Turner: She's a member of major professional associations. The Association for the Study of Afro American Life and History, the Mississippi Historical Association, the American Association of University Women. Among her professional honors are a scroll for outstanding contributions to higher education awarded by Omega Psi Phi fraternity, the highest award that can be given to a non-member. She was a William Robertson Coe Fellow at Stanford University in the summer of 1971. She received a fellowship from the African American Institute to travel to East Africa in 1972. She received an outstanding educator award in 1973, and was selected as the alumnus of the year by Tougaloo College in 1976. And the last I don't fully understand, but perhaps is the most fascinating of all, in terms of its relation to the period we're discussing. She is an honorary Colonel, aide de camp of the staff of Governor Cliff Finch of the state of Mississippi, times have changed. Darwin Turner: She served also as a resource person, a group leader, in the Governor's Conference on Education in Mississippi, 1974/'75, and in the Governor's Conference on the Humanities in 1975. Among her publications are Getting to Know Who We Are, Tougaloo's Blues, and interview with Governor William Waller of Mississippi, and It's Winter in America. I met Professor Holloway last year when I was visiting the Moton Center at Cappahosic. It is, as some of you may know, it is as far as I know, with the possible exception of the Du Bois Institute at Harvard, the only institute in the country for individuals who are interested in advanced study of Afro American culture. I was fascinated to learn that Professor Holloway was studying themes of Black music during the 1960s, and discussed with her then the possibility of her meeting with us during the summer to discuss with all of us the research that she's engaged in now. I'm very pleased to introduce Professor Lou Emma Holloway, to discuss the Blacks in soul music of the 1960s. Lou Emma Hollow...: I'd better sit down now. Y'all looking all bright and bushy-tailed. Eight hours of sleep last night. It's difficult when you're dealing with Black soul music to try to follow a scholarly format, and I just don't do that anyway. I remember when I'd read for the Association for Afro American Life and History, John Hope Franklin would be on one side, and Benjamin Quarles was on the other, and I'm propped up and everybody else is like this. And finally they gave up on it. I want to say just a word, because we're going to have to stop on time, and I want the music to speak for itself. Just a word about how I got into this. Lou Emma Hollow...: As you know, those of us who are working in Black colleges, and I suppose many of you who are working in other colleges, found that the time has come for us to do something innovative to deal with the students who are coming to us with certain kinds of deficiencies. And as I am teaching Afro American history and I'm dealing with freshman students, I decided that it was crazy to start them dealing with documents that are not on their turf. And since I know that our students do listen to music, I decided I wanted to take that music and see if I could use that music to take them to another place by transcribing the lyrics and letting them look at the lyrics as documents, to learn the whole technique of analysis and interpretation. The rationale being, if you take them on their turf and let them learn the techniques, then you can take them to another place like dealing with a document like Frederick Douglass' 1852 July oration, The Transfer of the Skills. Lou Emma Hollow...: The next thing, even history, even Afro American history, to some students seems dull if you're sticking to the text. So I didn't want anybody sleeping in my classes, and that was one reason, another reason that I did it. As I began as a Moton Fellow last year, working in the area, trying to research certain kinds of music, Black music of the '60s. Actually I started earlier, from say about migration to the present. But I didn't want the boy/girl stuff, because they had that. Lou Emma Hollow...: And one reason that I knew that they had it, in 1972 Isaac Hayes came to Jackson for a concert, and I'm sitting up here and our students are sitting down there, and that's when he came out with, I Stand Accused. Get on. 17, 18, 19-year-old kids, and they were just going all the way through. And when I got back to class the next morning I said, "18 and 19-year-old kids being accused?" They said, "Hey, you just don't know." So I figured, "Well okay, if you can get that message and you can deal with that and interpret all that to me, then you can do something else." So I started to search for music that spoke to the migration, the blues, because I am a blues person. The blues. And I wanted to find out whether the blues men had anything to say about the sufferings of Black people when you had the flood, and the boll weevil crisis. Lou Emma Hollow...: And then I wanted to see in the '20s during the Harlem Renaissance, because dear Alain Locke didn't say nothing about the blues, and Bessie Smith and them. But Bessie Smith did make an important social statement, just after the men from World War I returned. Recorded shortly after Du Bois had published his article in The Crisis of We Return, called Poor Man's Blues, where she sang to the rich man. "You need to give these people a job, that your wife is living on the hill, living like a queen, you see. But the poor man's wife..." Lou Emma Hollow...: Then of course you knew, if you started talking about the lynchings, the continued lynchings of the '30s and '40s, and other kinds of discrimination and oppressive measures imposed against Blacks in the South, you know that Billie Holiday did do her classic Strange Fruit. We get up to 1955, as the people's movement is starting in Montgomery Alabama, between 1955 and 1960 I haven't found that much music that spoke to that, except one lyric that... No, no. That's beyond that, the one that talks about Bull Connor, I found one on that. But by 1960, things are happening. Remember the NAACP slogan, "Support the NAACP and be free by '63?" Well just keep that in your mind, then. Okay? Lou Emma Hollow...: So as I began to research this period from the 1960s to the present, I'm sticking with the '60s now for this presentation, I found out that the Black soul music and the... If you look at the artist, it's Ellison. I like Ellison, in the essay Shadow and Act, about the spirit that moves Mahalia, he calls them Black interpretive artists, and I want to give those soul people some dignity, so I'll be referring to them as Black interpretive artists, because they are the people who put the music, took the lyrics, and took the people to another place, okay? Lou Emma Hollow...: So often in academia, when I started, I was in college some of my colleagues said, "Blues, popular music, soul. Nothing but noise, racket." So you have people look at you funny like you're on your way out, because we get tied up in all this Western stuff and then turn everything that we've got loose, and I wanted Black students to understand, because I am doing one chapter in the larger work, and I'm doing a movie about the crossover in soul music. Because you see, after a while as Parliament, Funkadelic, George Clinton said, "Endangered Species," and I at least want to record the fact that we were here and this was our music, because it's just like the jazz of the '20s. You couldn't make Duke Ellington, give Duke Ellington that prize, because you'd made Benny Goodman the king. You made Elvis Presley the king of, what is it? Audience: Rock and roll. Lou Emma Hollow...: The king of rock and roll, you see, and now we're going to make the Bee Gees take the place of the O'Jays, Temps, and all those beautiful guys. So it's a serious kind of thing, and if we don't watch it, and under the guise of music is universal, you see, we're going to lose something. I suggest that music is not universal, except the sound. A C is a C. But when you look at the lyrics, it reflects the culture of which it's a part, and Black oppression is not universal, I suggest. But you see, some Black people have gotten onto that. "Oh yes, blues." When White people discovered BB King, and he was all over here. "Oh yes, it's universal." "Here it is 3:00 in the morning, and my baby can't be found," that's universal? Lou Emma Hollow...: So what I'm suggesting is we have to be careful when we parcel out this, because we love to give the other groups something, because we think they're going to like us better, you see. So I see something that's happening now, that's going to be almost a repeat of the '20s, what Harold Cruise called White cultural imperialists, are still around. Okay, so I don't want to say too much, because I think the music is going to say most of it. I want to play something, and this has nothing to do with the lecture topic, but I just want to play it, just to see how it gets you. Like the preacher needs to get the spirit moving before he come with a message. Nina Simone: (singing) Lou Emma Hollow...: So, how many of you remember that? Came out of North Carolina. Mother was a minister in the church, her father was a deacon. Nina started playing, she's a natural genius, the organ and the piano around seven or eight. Her talent was soon discovered and encouraged, and she was then sent with a scholarship to Juilliard. And while she's in Juilliard and around New York, her scholarship ran out, plus her mother got concerned about the sister being in New York without nobody there with her. So she moved to Philadelphia, moved the family to Philadelphia so they could be near New York. And when her money ran out at Juilliard, she went over to Curtis Institute and started picking up gigs, playing for artists who were coming into town, and studying music. Then she went down to Atlantic City, looking for a job. And so the man said, "We want somebody to sing." Nina had never been a singer, she's playing piano. So she needed a job and she said, "All right, I'll take the job and I'll sing," and she began to pull from that Black church and that Black culture thing, and people loved her. Lou Emma Hollow...: We heard her on the scene first with Porgy, right? And that was about 1959 or '60, then we didn't hear from her again, because now she's playing in those slick, nice, beautiful supper clubs. Support the NAACP and be free by '63. Mississippi Goddam. The song was written in response to the murder of my friend Medgar Evers, and those four girls in Birmingham. And I remember, those of us who were in the movement in the South, remember that when it came out, sometimes when you got weary and decided you weren't going out there no more, let nobody hit you and call you all those names, and certainly no more in jail. When we would hear this, it would give us the thing that we needed to go with, which is think is what has kept us together all this way is our music, you see. And we would play that, and then you'd hear it on the radio stations and they'd bleep out Goddam, and that was all right. Lou Emma Hollow...: And I remember when we were working around Mississippi, and things got pretty rough, and somebody's getting a little weary, "You know what Nina said? Mississippi Goddam," and then you'd keep moving, you see. So it was inspirational music. This particular number really gave it to us, and I suggest that it's Nina Simone, who turned popular music around, and then the brothers began to follow suit. She's the one who has been consistent, up until 1974, her last album of '74 is entitled It Is Finished, 1974, but many of us know why. As Sonya said yesterday, "They will get you," you see. So she's now in Barbados, and she comes into New York and do that one big concert at Carnegie Hall, which is sold out two weeks after the tickets are put there, and then go back to Barbados. Lou Emma Hollow...: But when we had heard Porgy, so we hadn't heard from the sister, and when she came on the scene with this we said, "Wow, that's nothing but an essentially Black woman could be doing that." And see, so she wrote this song in response to the murder of our Black people, and it became the song that set other artists to thinking about, "What are we going to do with our art?" Art and song has a certain kind of freedom, and the artist has a certain kind of freedom. As Nina said when somebody asked her in '69, that her music sound bitter and these kind of things she said, "I would love to sing more love songs, but as long as I got to reflect the struggle of my people, I will do that, because I may leave a name and a legacy. They may remember me, because of that little thing that I did." Lou Emma Hollow...: So when I'm teaching the Black history, which of course is called Black culture in the 1960s to the present, I use this as a document, just as I use the Carmichael speeches, or Martin Luther King speeches, or the history books, or anything else, because I think it's legitimate. Who are we to say that the artist can't view the landscape and see something they don't like, and have to make a comment on it? And in fact Ellison has suggested that the music, and I suggest that the music of the '60s by the soul artists, makes terse comments on what Ellison calls, "those conditions created in the Black community because of denial of social justice." You see? And they made it. Lou Emma Hollow...: We know that our blues and our spirituals, but you see, our blues and our spirituals are subtle, what you would call subversive. But this music it outward. You don't have to wonder what Nina Simone means, and nor would you have to wonder what's going on. So let's hear Nina now do Mississippi Goddam. Nina Simone: The name of this tune is Mississippi Goddam, and I mean every word. (singing) Nina Simone: This is a show tune, but the show hasn't been written for it yet. (singing) Lou Emma Hollow...: And that was for real. Nina Simone: (singing) Nina Simone: Bet you thought I was kidding. Nina Simone: (singing) That's it. Audience: What year was that recorded? Lou Emma Hollow...: At '63. It came out late '63 or '64. Audience: What album is that on? Lou Emma Hollow...: That's the Best of Nina Simone. That's not the original, this is a collection. All right. She started in that vein, and that's the beginning, that's chapter one. She's going to do chapter two later. All right, she began to search around for other kinds of lyrics that would speak to the problems of Black people of the period, and she recorded another one that was actually taken from the Threepenny Opera, about this peasant woman. But she changed it and she's says, "a hotel in a Southern town". Well people who didn't know, who hadn't seen the Threepenny Opera, which she... Yeah. What Black... That's why I don't go to the lyrics and just copy them. That's why you have to get it from the album, because she will take this and improvise, and put the lyrics, change the lyrics a bit. Lou Emma Hollow...: So she says, "Southern town," you hear her talking about a Southern town, and you think this is a Black maid in a Southern town, working in a hotel where all these businessmen are coming in, and she's there waiting, and they think that she's so insignificant, as they usually think of us. You know they always talk around us, because we don't hear anyway, and don't understand. And it's a fantasy about what you would do if the coin, flipped the coin, you see. And it's called Pirate Jenny. Very interesting. Nina Simone: (singing) Lou Emma Hollow...: When you're sitting in those jails or at those lunch counters, or if you are working at voter registration and the enemies are all around you, and you know you're supposed to be non-violent. We used to call ourselves, say, "I feel like Pirate Jenny today. If I had my way." This song never went up on the chart. It was never put out on 45, because they don't go up on the chart. When people find out that there is a message in that music, you see that's when you have them take it off the air and you don't play it anymore. Lou Emma Hollow...: It's Nina Simone I think who said something about Black women that really set us, really on a roll. It's Four Women, and if you think of this as a drama, she's talking about the lifestyles of four women based on the shades of their color and their complexion. I realize that I didn't have the recording that she made in 1970, a live recording of this where she talks about Aunt Sarah, "107 years old, still walking the streets of Harlem. But that's all right, scrubbing them floors. She don't have much time now, but she's lived long enough to see the full circle come around." And then she talks about the vogue of wearing head rags, like Aunt Sarah. She says, "In fact, head rags are in style now." Then she talks about down South, her mother, when they called her Auntie, no Missus, and she said, "But if I had been there when they called my Mama Auntie, I would have burned the whole goddam place down." Lou Emma Hollow...: But this one does not have that dialogue, because this is the first one. This is in '70, because most of the music, many of the songs that she recorded in the '60s got a whole nother kind of sound to it when she records it after 1968. So here is that Four Women, and I think that this is an important thing, and Black coeds just love this number. It's Four Women. Audience: Is that still that same album, the [inaudible]? Lou Emma Hollow...: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Same album. Nina Simone: (singing) Lou Emma Hollow...: I think that most Black women identified with Peaches, I don't care what complexion they were. This is another kind of inspirational song, although it's coming out of the '60s, but it was very inspirational and let you, gave you something new to go out there and face the thing that... Also in the '60s, now that Nina Simone has set the pace, [inaudible] also shows that it was during the '60s that we first had the ghetto described graphically. Audience: Described what? Lou Emma Hollow...: Graphically, the ghetto. Lou Rawls, monologue, South side Chicago, and then he goes into Tobacco Road. This is The Best of Lou Rawls. Lou Rawls: As soon as I was big enough to get a job, save me some money, buy me a ticket, that's the first thing this morning. I left, and I made a promise that if they could just keep the thought out of my mind, I'd keep my feet out of the city limits. Because my part of Chicago, just as all cities have this particular residential area, in Detroit they call it Black Bottom. In Cleveland they call it Euclid Avenue, 55th, 105th, Central Avenue. In Philadelphia they call it South Street. In New York City they call it Harlem. Drop down below the cotton curtain, they call it, in Atlanta they call it Buttermilk Bottom. But then you come out West, where it's the best. In San Francisco they call it the Fillmore District. In Los Angeles they used to call it Watts. They changed the name, though. Lou Rawls: I speak about this place because I'm quite familiar with it. Every one is in some sense or other. It all boils down to the same thing, though. I speak about this place because you see, like the wintertime when it's very, very cold, and it gets colder in Chicago than anywhere else on Earth. Of course when it's around 10 above zero and there's about 12 inches of snow outside, and the hawk, they speak of the almighty hawk, and that's the wind. When he blows out speeds around 35, 40 miles an hour it's just like a giant razor blade going down the street, and all the clothes in the world can't help you. When you live in a place like I lived in, where everybody had a key to the front hall though, because it once was a flat but then they cut it up into kitchenette apartments. And you'd be in that front hall though, but the hawk get in there, boy you'd be calling it a bunch of dirty names before you can get in your room. But I have this, because I said before, because I know. Lou Rawls: (singing) Lou Emma Hollow...: When you're taking kids who come in from the urban areas or the rural ghettos, and you get them into a dialogue about that, you can really move them to another place, and they come out with some fantastic interpretations of what that's saying to them. And they like particularly when he says, "I'm going to come back with some dynamite and a crane and I'll blow it up and start it all over again," and the fact that they're not going to name it something fancy, they're going to make it pretty and then name it Tobacco Road. All kinds of pedagogical utility you can use with this in teaching young Blacks or Whites. Lou Emma Hollow...: You can't tell on these- Audience: Approximate. Lou Emma Hollow...: Approximate. That's approximately, that's after Watts. Audience: So '65, some time. Lou Emma Hollow...: It's after Watts. Also my research shows that it's during the '60s that we have Black music lyrics speaking about Africa. And Lou Rawls again records this, and it's called My Ancestors. Lou Rawls: (singing) Lou Emma Hollow...: A young college man really can go to town on that. The ladies just have to be quiet when they take that one apart. But 1967, that's now after the 1966, June, when Stokely Carmichael, 16 miles above my college, 16 miles above Jackson on Highway 51, had been in Canton where there was war the night before. The next morning they're on the way down Route 51, when he said, "Black power." Black power. You see, somebody is going to have to write the real story one day. Because they'd been up in Grenada, Mississippi, and by this time we have all the young White college kids coming down. One of the problems was that they didn't understand where they were, and they had a thing about bringing the TV out, so we can have the TV. The Blacks say, "Hey no, these people got to live here. Let's don't do that." Lou Emma Hollow...: So there was that split. The Blacks began to feel that these young Whites were dictating strategy, taking over the movement. See, Chaney told them not to leave Meridian when they went to Philadelphia that night. So there's a whole bunch of things going on. There's the conflict between the sisters and the brothers, because they'd been messing around. There's a whole lot of things going on, that when people hear Black Power they don't know unless they were there what was going on. I was telling Joyce Ladner that. I said, "Hey, y'all ought to tell the story one day." Lou Emma Hollow...: So it was one of those things, like when Black people just had enough and they just explode. And Harry Goldman, remember him? Who wrote Vertical Integration. He was one of the first ones to accuse, and to say Black racist. Militants. Southern Whites did not put those names on us, because we don't call ourselves militants and things. We call ourselves kings and dukes. And then the press, you see, began to give us prime time, trying to explain the philosophy behind Black Power. And as I look back now, I see one of our mistakes was that we didn't understand, when they gave us prime time, to tell them what we were going to do, and then later on that, "We're going to burn the motherfucker down," and all that. We told them exactly what to do, so why, then they could come up with the King Arthur's plan, you see. As we look in retrospect, those are some of the mistakes we made, but the time was such that you had to do what you had to do. Lou Emma Hollow...: Okay. Then Curtis Mayfield, lead singer with the Impressions. Lyricist, very heavy brother, came out with Pushing, Keep on Pushing, and Moving On Up. Moving On Up. That tune was one of the songs that gave the people in the movement inspiration to keep on pushing and keep on moving. When he was with the Impressions, what I'm going to play is the same, We Are a Winner, but is recorded in '70, and things are going to happen with it. Many Black, I mean Black-oriented radio stations would not let it be played, you see. Lou Emma Hollow...: And if you notice, Curtis Mayfield has never had anything on the chart. He doesn't write that kind of music, you see. He's now, after he left the Impressions, formed his own group and record company, and this is recorded live, and I'm playing this one rather than the Impressions one, because there's something when you've got a Black artist performing live with a live audience, because it's like the church. Got to have you talking back to me. Call and response, that African thing. Lou Emma Hollow...: And if you'd remember, when he first came out with it in '67, when he takes a part of another song and say, "Keep on pushing like your leaders tell you to." This is recorded in '70 and he says, "Like Martin Luther tells you to." Okay? Yes, that's the major difference in the recording. It's called We Are a Winner. This is where it's- Curtis Mayfield: (singing) Lou Emma Hollow...: Hear the church in the background? Curtis Mayfield: (singing) Curtis Mayfield: You may remember reading in your Jet and Johnson publications, a whole lot of stations didn't want to play that particular recording. Can you imagine such a thing? Well I would say the way I'm sure most of you would say it, "We don't give a damn, we're a winner anyway." Right on? I got a little strength out there tonight. Now, I'm going to say... (singing) Curtis Mayfield: We've got just another version that we'd like to lay to you about here. Believing very strongly about equality and freedom for all, and especially we people who are darker than blue. We'd like to just lay another version to you. Trying not to offend anyone, but basically telling it like it is. Curtis Mayfield: (singing) Curtis Mayfield: Continue to be a winner, all of you. Lou Emma Hollow...: That's powerful. We're going to have to stop cutting off the end of it. I'm having to watch my clock. Audience: Brother be getting down, and you cut him right off. Lou Emma Hollow...: Now.