MOVEMENT AND OUR MUSIC 🎶
Listening today to "Satchmo," Louis Armstrong's band playing "Black and Blue " whose lyrics ask "what did I do to be so black and blue," I marveled at its deep-souled, indigo-colored candor of our lives.
Coded in rhythmic pathos, but not hidden, from plain hearing, or view, that song that was played in 1965 in Berlin, West Germany by Louis Armstrong, on a visit sponsored by our cold-war era State Department.
Music has accompanied every stage of black struggle in America. Louis' jazz is emblematic of this fact; as were the blues, ragtime, spirituals, vaudeville, work songs, battle songs of the Civil War, also including childhood play songs.
Now, on July 4, 2017, we are all the blessed beneficiaries of all the vast variety of African American musical forms that have gone before . Our presence in America has produced this unique music that has become the standard music of the world.
Whether it is "old school" boogie woogie and Louis Jordan, Motown, Dizzy Gillespie's Bebop, Sam Cook, James Brown, Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, John Coltrane , Michael Jackson, Prince , Jay-Z, Beyoncé , Lady Day, Ella, Aretha. So many!
You get the point. You feel me?
Our music has comforted , inspired and accompanied us along the way.
What did I do to be so black and blue? Nothing. It was but the will of God. No causality can explain this.
"We shall overcome someday. Deep in my heart ❤️ I do believe that we shall overcome someday."
That was another song we stepped to along the Freedom Highway. I suspect a new music is somewhere out there mouldering with John Brown's body, trumpeting reveille !
