Abstract
In this chapter, I want to consider the sonic culture of the Black Power movement, specifically, the discourse on blackness in music recorded live or in studio, or recordings of speeches, poetry, film soundtracks, radio broadcasts, and other artifacts dating from the 1960s and 1970s. Insofar as Black Power is known to successive generations, it is often seen—through visual iconography, fashion, and political spectacle, as depicted in film footage and documentary photography. Nevertheless, as a substantial body of critical writing and scholarship has shown, African American writers, activists, and visual artists of the era were often inspired by black music.1 The sonic culture of Black Power, through commercial recordings of speeches, poetry readings, spoken-word performances, interviews, radio broadcasts, and most prominently, music, offered a crucial means by which local information and messages about liberation struggles reached national and international audiences. During the 1960s and 1970s, popular music became a critical site for reflection on the meaning of blackness, on the historical relationship of African Americans to the United States, to the African diaspora, and to the world.2 The global reach and influence of the Black Power movement was arguably achieved through the era’s recorded music, as much as the iconography of images of US black liberation struggles brought by documentary photography, film, and television to overseas audiences, or the international touring of black and African activists and musicians.
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Notes
See, for example, Lorenzo Thomas, Don’t Deny My Name: Words and Music and the Black Intellectual Tradition (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008);
Farah Jasmine Griffin, If You Can’t Be Free, Be A Mystery: In Search of Billie Holiday (New York: One World/Ballantine, 2002);
Richard J. Powell, Black Art and Culture in the 20th Century (London: Thames and Hudson, 1997);
Kamau Brathwaite, Roots (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993);
Nathaniel Mackey, “Other: From Noun to Verb,” Representations 39 (Spring 1992): 51–70;
Ralph Ellison, Shadow and Act (New York: Vintage Books, 1964).
See, for example, George Lipsitz, Footsteps in the Dark: The Hidden Histories of Popular Music (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007);
Richard Iton, Search of the Black Fantastic: Politics and Popular Culture in the Post-Civil Rights Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008);
Mark Anthony Neal, What the Music Said: Black Popular Music and Black Public Culture (New York: Routledge, 1999).
On the Black Arts movement, see James Smethurst, The Black Arts Movement: Literary Nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005);
Margo Crawford and Lisa Gail Collins, New Thoughts on the Black Arts Movement (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2006);
Elizabeth Alexander, The Black Interior: Essays (New York: Graywolf Press, 2004).
There are numerous biographies of Stevie Wonder, but among the works that situate him to some extent within the civil rights movement, see Craig Werner, Higher Ground: Stevie Wonder, Aretha Franklin, Curtis Mayfield and the Rise and Fall of American Soul (New York: Crown, 2004);
James E. Perone, The Sound of Stevie Wonder: His Words and Music (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2006);
Dennis Love and Stacy Brown, Blind Faith: The Miraculous Journey of Lula Hardaway, Stevie Wonder’s Mother (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2002);
Ted Hull (with Paula L. Stahel), The Wonder Years: My Life and Times with Stevie Wonder (Tampa, FL: n.p., 2002);
John Swenson, Stevie Wonder (New York: Harper and Row, 1986);
and Constanze Elsner, Stevie Wonder (New York: Popular Library, 1977).
For an insightful discussion of “Living in the City,” see Farah Jasmine Griffin, Who Set You Flowin’: The African American Migration Narrative (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 97–98. James Baldwin has written of his personal encounters with prisons and the criminal justice system in No Name in the Street (New York: Dell Publishing, 1972), 100–118; 142–149 and in his essay “Equal in Paris,” in Notes of a Native Son, James Baldwin, ed. (New York: Boston: Beacon Press, 1968), 138–158.
Studies of this conjuncture of overlapping literary diasporas include Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004);
Kevin Meehan, African American and Caribbean Cultural Exchange (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi Press, 2009);
Louise Bennett, Jamaica Labrish (Kingston: Novelty Trading, 1966),
and Kamau Brathwaite, History of the Voice: The Development of Nation Language in Anglophone Caribbean Poetry (London: New Beacon Books, 1984).
Frederick Douglass, The Narrative and Selected Writings (New York: The Modern Library, 1984), 28–30;
W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Sorrow Songs,” in The Souls of Black Folk, W. E. B. Du Bois, ed. (New York: Penguin Books, 1989), 204–216.
Langston Hughes, “Bebop,” in The Collected Works of Langston Hughes: The Early Simple Stories, Volume 7, Donna Akiba Sullivan Harper, eds. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2002), 227–228;
Hughes A, Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods For Jazz (New York: Knopf, 1961);
James Baldwin, “Sonny’s Blues,” in Going to Meet The Man, James Baldwin, ed. (New York: Dial Press, 1965);
Ann Petry, “Solo on the Drums,” in Miss Muriel and Other Stories, Ann Petry, ed. (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1971),
Amiri Baraka, Blues People: Negro Music in White America (New York: William Morrow, 1963);
Nikki Giovanni, “Poem for Aretha,” in Collected Poems, Nikki Giovanni, ed. (New York: William Morrow, 1996).
For insightful discussions of the relationship of black music with the civil rights and Black Power movements, see Nelson George, The Death of Rhythm and Blues (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1989),
and Mark Anthony Neal, What the Music Said: Black Popular Music and Black Public Culture (New York: Routledge, 1999).
John Collins, Fela: Kalakuta Notes (Amsterdam: KIT, 2009);
Dorian Lynskey, 33 Revolutions Per Minute (New York: Harper Collins, 2011), 231–244.
On FESTAC, see Michael E. Veal, FELA: The Life and Times of a Musical Icon (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2000), 183.
Dudley Randall and Margaret Burroughs, eds. For Malcolm: Poems on the Life and Death of Malcolm X (Detroit, MI: Broadside Press, 1967).
Harold Cruse, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (New York: Quill, 1984), 42, 71.
Peniel Joseph, Waiting ’til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 2006);
Komozi Woodard, A Nation within a Nation: Amiri Baraka (Leroi Jones) and Black Power Politics (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999);
Thomas Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North (New York: Random House, 2008);
Matthew J. Countryman, Up South: Civil Rights and Black Power in Philadelphia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006).
Robin D. G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2002).
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1966);
Kwame Nkrumah, Class Struggle in Africa (New York: International Publishers, 1970);
C. L. R. James, Nkrumah and the Ghana Revolution (Westport, CT: L. Hill, 1977).
Rupert Lewis, Walter Rodney’s Intellectual and Political Thought (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1998).
June Jordan, “Bringing Back the Person,” in New Perspectives on Black Studies, John Blassingame, ed. (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1971), pp. 28–39.
Angela Davis, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism (New York: Vintage Books, 1998).
James Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2011).
Peter Guralnick, Sweet Soul Music: Rhythm and Blues and the Southern Dream of Freedom (New York: Back Bay Books, 1999); Nikki Giovanni, “Aretha Poem” in “Truth Is on Its Way,” in Collected Poetry of Nikki Giovanni 1968–1998 (New York: William Morrow, 1996)
Ntozake Shange, For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/when the Rainbow Is Enuf (San Lorenzo, CA: Shameless Hussy Press, 1975);
Michele Wallace, Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman (New York: Dial Press, 1979). Wallace discusses the negative reception of Black Macho in her collection of essays, Invisibility Blues: From Pop to Theory (London: Verso Press, 1990).
John Collins, West African Pop Roots (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1992), 65.
George Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2008).
Maureen Mahon, Right to Rock: The Black Rock Coalition and the Cultural Politics of Race (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004).
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© 2012 Nico Slate
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Gaines, K. (2012). Music Is a World: Stevie Wonder and the Sound of Black Power. In: Slate, N. (eds) Black Power beyond Borders. Contemporary Black History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137295064_10
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