All posts by Robert Darden

I am an associate professor of Journalism at Baylor University. My passion -- and research agenda -- is in black gospel music. I am currently researching a book on the influence of black sacred music on the Civil Rights Movement. My previous books include "People Get Ready: A New History of Black Gospel Music."
Dick Campbell, Gussie Oscar, Waco

Surprising Waco

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IMG_0117My research into the period between the Civil War (the spirituals) and the Civil Rights Movement (gospel music) continues to take some surprising turns. I mentioned African American pianist/producer/arranger Sammy Price a couple of posts ago. Turns out, there were a number of black artists who got their start here during this era.

Also in Waco in the 1920s was Dick Campbell, a significant figure in the Harlem Renaissance. Campbell attended Paul Quinn College from 1922-1926, became and actor and performer with the likes of Ethel Waters, Bill “Bojangles” Robinson and Louis Armstrong before setting in Harlem, where he helped found the Negro People’s Theatre and co-found the famed Rose McClendon Players and Harlem Workshop Theater.

          Waco was also fortunate to have a number of venues for live performances, most notably the Waco Auditorium. From most its history – from its inception in 1899 to its closing in 1928 – the Auditorium benefitted from the management and booking skills of the remarkable Gussie Oscar. Oscar had an eye for talent and capitalizing on the city’s location mid-way between Dallas and Austin, she saw to it that the most famous names of the day – Will Rogers, Harry Houdini, Jascha Heitfitz, Sarah Bernhardt and even the Four Marx Brothers performed in Waco amid the usual operas and symphony concerts.

          Oscar was also very progressive when it came to race, in addition to the ever-present minstrel shows and so-called “colored revues,” she booked blues legend Mamie Smith and Her Jazz Hounds. She also brought Black Patti and Her Troubadores back on an annual basis. Black Patti was Sissieretta Jones, a gifted opera singer who could also sing vaudeville and show tunes and hers was one of the very few all-black legitimate shows to tour the Deep South.

So the Marx Brothers, Mamie Smith, AND Harry Houdini all visited Waco? As my son would say, “Whoa!”

Gospel, James Taylor, Labor Movement, Spirituals

The Spirituals and the Labor Movement

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W.C. Handy, the so-called “Father of the Blues,” once said on a radio broadcast that he was always inspired by the spirituals and that the spirituals did more for the slave’s emacipation than all of the guns of the Civil War.

I’ve spent the past few years examining the influence of the spirituals, Freedom Songs, gospel songs, R&B songs, and the hymns of Isaac Watts on the Civil Rights Movement. And people like Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga) have echoed Handy’s words as they relate to another fight, 100 years later.

So it shouldn’t have surprised me to discover that the spirituals were used by African Americans in the labor movements of the 1920s and ’30s as well, when the Federal government used American soldiers to slaughter strikers and corporations controlled entire blocs of states, not just their representatives.

This research path has taken me to “New Masses,” “The Labor Defender” and other feisty newspapers and magazines from that era. And in an article on the lynchings in the U.S. in 1933, there is an account of what black Share Croppers Delegation at the Farmers Second National Conference sang that year, to the tune of the spiritual, “We Shall Not Be Moved:”

“We fight against the terror/We shall not be moved/We fight against terror/We shall not be moved/Just like at tree that’s planted by water/We shall not be moved.”

Which brings me to my favorite James Taylor song, “Millworker,” written for a musical version of Studs Terkel’s “Working” project. Few songs move me as powerfully as this:

Now my grandfather was a sailor
He blew in off the water
My father was a farmer
And I, his only daughter
Took up with a no good mill-working man
From Massachusetts
Who dies from too much whiskey
And leaves me these three faces to feed

Millwork ain’t easy
Millwork ain’t hard
Millwork it ain’t nothing
But an awful boring job
I’m waiting for a daydream
To take me through the morning
And put me in my coffee break
Where I can have a sandwich
And remember

Then its me and my machine
For the rest of the morning
For the rest of the afternoon
And the rest of my life

Now my mind begins to wander
To the days back on the farm
I can see my father smiling at me
Swinging on his arm
I can hear my granddads stories
Of the storms out on lake eerie
Where vessels and cargos and fortunes
And sailors lives were lost

Yes, but its my life has been wasted
And I have been the fool
To let this manufacturer
Use my body for a tool
I can ride home in the evening
Staring at my hands
Swearing by my sorrow that a young girl
Ought to stand a better chance

So may I work the mills just as long as I am able
And never meet the man whose name is on the label

It be me and my machine
For the rest of the morning
And the rest of the afternoon
Gone for the rest of my life

A Life's Work, David Licata, Documentary

Documentary

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As some of you know, I’m one of the four subjects of an upcoming documentary by the brilliant film-maker, David Licata. The film is called “A Life’s Work” and is about people who are working on something that will continue long after they’re gone. In my case, it is the Black Gospel Music Restoration Project. There are features on someone who is working with the SETI project and another on a father/son team trying to save copies of the world’s old growth forest trees and still another on a guy who has been working on sustainable apartments — for decades.

It’s pretty august company. But David and his cameraman Wolfgang (a well-known cinematographer) spent a couple of days with Mary and I in Chicago while I was interviewing gospel artists, pastors and Freedom Riders from the Civil Rights era.

After a lifetime of interviewing other people, sometimes it is a bit unnerving to be interviewed at such length (and depth) yourself. It makes you articulate things about yourself that you’ve never expressed (or even thought about) in public. David was a wonderful, thoughtful interviewer. And, from time to time, while looking for insights, that’s exactly what happened.

My rambling notwithstanding, “A Life’s Work” is an excellent, intriguing, educational blog, too. I commend it to you.

And my wish for you all is that you’ll be interviewed for eight hours on camera someday …

New York Times, Teaching

What are we teaching?

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Perhaps you saw the article in The New York Times on 10/20/09: “Field Study: Just How Relevant is Political Science?” (C1) While the piece specifically addresses research, I believe it has a message for university teachers as well, one that is contained in this quote from Joseph Nye, a professor at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard:

“The danger is that political science is moving in the direction of saying more and more about less and less.”

Substitute the academic disciple of your choice for “political science” …

The underlying question here is directed only at me, and it is one I need to continually address — “Am I teaching what my students really need to know OR what I was taught 35 years ago that they need?”

Gospel music

Black preaching/Black music

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One of the threads that created the fabric of gospel music is black preaching. The “hard gospel” quartets — the Mighty Clouds of Joy, the Blind Boys of Mississippi and many others — all featured a hoarse-sounding lead singer who testified while he sang. You can hear that voice in Wilson Pickett or Otis Redding … both came from “the church.”

Now, hold that thought …

I’ve been reading “Birmingham Revolutionaries: The Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth and the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights,” edited by Marjorie L. White and Andrew M. Manis. Shuttlesworth, of course, was one of the true heroes of the Civil Rights Movement, someone who fearlessly endured the repeated bombings of his home and church, attacks on himself and his family, and the daily indignities of being a proud black man in Birmingham in the 1950s and ’60s. “Birmingham Revolutionaries” is a collection of essays from a symposium in his honor a few years ago.

These are the closing paragraphs of the essay by Manis, himself a black preacher …

“So as I close, if you will indulge the preacher in me, I would say that America still needs to listen to Birmingham’s revolutionaries, but also to their ancestors in the slave quarters and the brush arbors. There, in what was called the ring shout, the slaves sang and danced in the Spirit, rhythmically moving in a circular direction — a holy song and dance that bore the marks of their free and African past. Every day the long, sad shadows moving clockwise around the sundial reminded them of their present world of enslavement. But in their ring shout they found the prophetic courage to move counter-clockwise, against the movement of the sun, against time as their masters defined it. And in their circle of faith, they symbolically sang and danced their resistance to the life of slavery around them.

“Today, as we remember Birmingham’s heroes, let us also learn something from the ways of their ancestors. Let us follow them, and like Fred Shuttlesworth, dance out that joyful, fiery African-American spirit against the grain of still-race-conscious culture. Let us also dance against the grain of earlier consensus, focusing primarily on King and the national movement, to give historic credit where it is also due.

“So circle up. Circle up with Brother Frederick Douglass … and line up with Sister Sojourner Turth … and fall in behind Fred Shuttlesworth and these Birmingham revolutionaries … and get in that circle behind Addie Mae and Carole and Denise and Cynthia — those four little saints blown by hatred from this church into the very arms of God. Circle up with them all. Circle up and emulate their courage and, if you are so inclined, pray for the day when we can sing as truly as did they:

“Slav’ry chain done broke at last — Gon’ praise God ’til I die!”

Soul

Blue-eyed Soul

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Do you believe in the concept of “blue-eyed soul”? It has been used as a perjorative (Michael McDonald or Michael Bolton — white guys trying to sound black) and it has been used as a compliment (Steve Winwood and, of course, Van Morrison). Sam Baker has it.

His is an extraordinary story: He was “caught in someone else’s war,” as he says. Riding on a train in Peru, his compartment had a IED planted by the Shining Path terrorists. He alone survived, but with brain injuries, a shattered left shoulder, his left hand crushed beyond recognition, and a host of internal injuries. Multiple surgeries and years of rehab later, he re-learned to speak and walk, taught himself to play guitar left-handed (he can hold a pick, but little else) and began writing the most astonishing songs I’ve ever heard.

Sam Baker played at UT’s beloved Cactus Cafe Saturday night. Flanked by a weathered poster from a previous performer (the late Townes Van Zandt, who would have loved Sam’s music) and accompanied by a single musician who played violin and mandolin, Baker played what may have been the single most memorable concert I’ve ever heard — and I’ve heard 100s of them.

His songs, many of which are short stories, others of which are sharply drawn vignettes (he’s also a painter), all have a lovely melancholy, reinforced by occasional repetition and Sam’s halting (he still struggles with aphasia) voice, which leads for some unexpected — but altogether wonderful — pauses.

If you have an iPod or Rhapsody, please do yourself a favor and take a chance on his songs “Waves” and “Baseball” … if you don’t like them, I’ll refund your $2.

Blue-eyed soul? Oh my, yes …

Black Preaching, Gospel music

This helped me in my research …

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“The Black Church maintains a clear prophetic tradition as part of a priestly function throughout its history. ” — William B. McClain

“Our songs and our prayers, our music and our meditations, our liturgical stance and our new theology must present the prophetic face of divine anger born of dignity and determination, undergirded by the Holy Spirit, to bring the sword in pursuit of the positive peace without which no man can experience salvation.” — Jefferson P. Rogers

I’m not always sure where “Nothing But Love in God’s Water: The Influence of Black Sacred Music on Civil Rights Movement” is going … but words like these make me think I’m at least searching for the right path.

Black Gospel Music, Waco

Connections …

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… researching Sister Rosetta Tharpe’s connection to the Civil Rights Movement (she played a number of benefits for the NAACP) leads me to “What Do They Want? A Jazz Autobiography” by Sammy Price. Price was a legendary pianist/arranger/song-writer during the ’40s and ’50s — sometimes known as “The King of Boogie Woogie.” He also produced some of Sister Rosetta’s biggest hits.

Turns out, Price lived in Waco until about age 18. He has vivid memories of the Cotton Palace, the fair, listening to blues on Bridge Street at the Gaiety Club, fighting with Baylor University students on the street cars, hearing Blind Lemon Jefferson on the downtown Waco square, and learning piano on an aunt’s 10-foot grand.

He also hears a chilling blues song about a horrific lynching in Robinson (then called Robinsonville):

I never have, and I never will/pick no more cotton in Robinsonville

At 18, he takes the Interurban to Dallas and makes a name for himself on Deep Ellum. But it begins in Waco …

Connections …

Black Gospel Music

Sister Rosetta Tharpe

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I’ve been asked to write a couple of entries for a new encyclopedia … and one of the entries is on Sister Rosetta Tharpe. Like all scholars, I am much indebted to Gayle F. Wald’s recent ground-breaking research on Sister Rosetta, particularly Tharpe’s influence on the bands of the British Invasion. Sister Rosetta toured with the early R&B shows in England and the Continent and everybody from Cream’s Ginger Baker to the Moody Blues cite her as a significant influence.

Back in the U.S., Johnny Cash, Elvis, and Carl Perkins were all fans. And when Jerry Lee Lewis auditioned for Sam Phillips at Sun Records, he chose Tharpe’s “Strange Things Happen Every Day”!

Shout, Sister Rosetta!

Black Gospel Music

God’s economy

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Now in my third year of systematically reading the literature of the Civil Rights Movement, I’m down to the lesser known diaries, smaller incidents, obscure documents, and half-forgotten tales of local heroes — and even local villains. It is rarely less than fascinating. I’m making lots of connections … which, I suppose, is the point of information gathering and story-telling.

Probably most people already knew that the roots of both the women’s rights movement and anti-war movement are to be found in the turbulence created by the civil rights movement. Not that both didn’t exist independently before — they did — but they gathered impetus and power and (sometimes just as importantly) media savvy from the mistakes and successes of the civil rights movement.

Reflecting Mona’s post on women, I’m convinced yet again that all movements concerned with justice never really end…

Which brings me to something that bothers me about the otherwise generally wonderful students here at Baylor, something that I think reveals a deeper, unresolved societal issue. My students insist on calling women professors “Miz.” Sometimes “Miss” and sometimes “Mrs.” — but usually “Miz.” Nearly every female professor I know has a Ph.D., and yet the default address is “Miz.”

Not so for their male colleagues. I’m invariably “Doctor Darden.” I don’t have a Ph.D. Men are “Doctor,” women are “Miz.”

One of my colleages thinks it has to do with the fact that virtually all of their elementary, junior high and high school teachers were female (save for the coaches, who are usually male and therefore “Coach So-and-So”).

That may be true. But somewhere, perhaps this is a Southern thing, I don’t know, students are subtly pressured to make this kind of distinction. It’s darn near automatic. It’s a respect thing … and we, as male educators, need to do a LOT more to reinforce this simple courtesy   — female professors deserve to be called “DOCTOR.” Students — call your female professors “DOCTOR” until specifically told otherwise.

Now, don’t get me started on the glaring lack of female administrators at Baylor (and too many other colleges in the South) …