It’s Black History Month, so why not feature a man who I consider to be one of the four greatest voices* in the history of pop music? I’m talking about the astonishing, amazing, absolutely one-of-a-kind Sam Cooke. Every time I listen to a song by Cooke, I’m freshly bedazzled by the absolute control he has over his instrument. A voice like his–a kind of gravely high tenor, one of the most unusual kinds of voices to hear–can be so very difficult to control, but Cooke always homes right in on the pitch he intends to hit, and his melismatic gifts are the stuff of legend. Sam Cooke makes singing just about any song sound utterly effortless, but when you try to sing along, you can almost feel him leaving you in the dust, grinning as he goes.
I don’t want to dwell on the awful facts of Sam Cooke’s very strange death, so I won’t. But I will note that the world was robbed of one of its greatest voices that day.
Here are several songs by Sam Cooke.
* The other three are Freddie Mercury, Annie Lennox, and Ann Wilson.
I haven’t posted in a couple weeks–sorry!–but the reasons, as ever, are good (I hope). Having received feedback on the manuscript of The Savior Worlds (The Song of Forgotten Stars, book 4) from several trusted voices, it’s time for another heavy dose of revision work before I send the thing out for proofreading in March. I’ve got kind of a hard deadline going here: I need to have this draft (Draft 3.0) ready to go by the end of this month. The ultimate goal is to release Book 4 at Nickel City Con in May, and that’s a lot closer than it feels!
As I write this post, I’m about a third of the way through the book, and I’m a little more than a third of the way through the month (and The Wife and I have a weekend getaway coming up at the end of next week that will not be a great time for writing), so I’ve really got my work cut out. I do want to keep this space alive a lot more than I have in the past, so…as always, here’s hoping!
Continuing an exploration of work of black composers in this, Black History Month, I turn to William Grant Still, one of the best-known black composers. The difficulty black composers have faced in history can be illustrated in the fact that Still lived from 1895 to 1978, dying in my lifetime, and yet many of his works are already lost. Still was born in Arkansas, where his musical life began, but his life later took him to Ohio, New York (where he is considered part of the Harlem Renaissance), and finally to Los Angeles, where the house in which he lived is now designated a Los Angeles Historical Monument. Still was a prolific composer over his long life, and he achieved things in music that would be the pride of any composer, much less a black one from a country not historically known for rewarding the creative efforts of its minorities.
Still wrote his symphonic poem Africa in 1930, after he had spent his youth working in W.C. Handy’s band and studying composition with Edgar Varese. Still’s style combines African-American sounds–blues, spirituals–with traditional orchestral writing. Africa comprises a musical depiction of a continent to which Still never traveled, and he would describe the work as “the Africa of my imagination.” He even opens the piece with distant drums tapping an almost tribal rhythm before the more plaintive orchestral writing begins. Still described his work, which traces three movements, in a letter thusly:
“An American Negro has formed a concept of the land of his ancestors based largely on its folklore, and influenced by his contact with American civilization. He beholds in his mind’s eye not the Africa of reality but an Africa mirrored in fancy, and radiantly ideal.
I. He views it first as a land of peace; peace that is partly pastoral in nature and partly spiritual.
II. It is to him also a land of fanciful and mysterious romance; romance tinged with ineffable sorrow.
III. Contact with American civilization has not enabled him to completely overcome his inherent superstitious nature. It is that heritage of his forebears binding him irrevocably to the past, and making it possible for him to form the most definite concept of Africa.”
Africa is a lyrical and rhythmic work that seems to sway and dance with sound that recalls blues and spirituals, but in a more distant way, hinting at the ancestral home of the musical traditions that African-Americans would make central to their often sad experiences in America. It’s a fascinating piece.
What a strange winter we’re having in WNY! Our snowfall is way down, well below average, and Lake Erie remains almost entirely ice-free. At this point in the season, the lake is almost certainly guaranteed to remain wide open (we’re past winter’s halfway point, and as temperatures slowly go up, so will the amount of sunlight the lake receives, thus preventing large formations of ice)…which you would think would mean that we’re set up for a lot of the dreaded lake-effect snow, but you have to have really cold air blowing over the lake for that to happen and so far, we haven’t even had that. But we did get some snow over the weekend, resulting in these lovely scenes from Chestnut Ridge Park in the hills south of Buffalo….
The kicker? Today and tomorrow we’re above freezing, so we’re already melting all that off. Sigh!
Featuring black musicians this month in honor of Black History Month, here’s a good one. If your spine isn’t tingled by this, I don’t know what to do for you. Here is William Warfield singing “Ol’ Man River” from Showboat. Just listen to the lyrics of that final verse:
I get weary,
and sick of tryin’;
I’m tired of livin’,
and scared of dyin’.
But ol’ man river–
he just keeps rollin’
along.
Amazing song, sung in what must be one of the great vocal performances of all time.
February is Black History Month, so each of this month’s regular music selections (Tone Poem Tuesday and Something for Thursday) will feature music either composed, or performed, or both, by black musicians.
George Walker (1922-2018) was the first black composer to win the Pulitzer Prize for music, for a work entitled Lilacs. Walker was a teacher, a composer, and a performer of note, and he had what was by all accounts a long and successful musical life before he died at the age of 96. This work is an exuberant bit of modern dance that he wrote on commission from the Las Vegas Symphony, in commemoration of that city’s centennial celebration. Hoopla: A Touch of Glee is a bright and bold orchestral showpiece that thrums with the odd optimism of Las Vegas, a city that has no reason to exist other than to be a place where the kinds of things that go on in Vegas…go on. I’ve been listening to this oddly infectious work for several days now, and it’s not easy to forget.
