Civil Rights Music

by Reiland Rabaka

  Classic rhythm & blues’ expression of double-consciousness captured and communicated mid-twentieth century African American existence at the intersection of its diverse and incessantly overlapping hybrid heritages, which represented African Americans’ aspirations and frustrations in the two decades following World War II. On the one hand, by the 1950s both African America and European America regularly recognized that there was indeed something called “white” popular music—although, from a historical, cultural, and musicological perspective, the Great American Songbook, especially Tin Pan Alley pop, was greatly indebted to African American music, most notably blues, ragtime, and jazz.[26]

  On the other hand, there was African American’s creolized musical culture and customs, with their own collection of preferred devices and performance practices, most of which were traceable back to Africa, but all of which had been boldly recreated to speak to the special needs of Africans in America in the middle of the twentieth century. Situated somewhere between those slippery and sliding, theoretical, yet conventionally understood and embraced, black and white musical poles the African American masses’ musical tastes illusively reside. And, it is here, in-between these two musical poles, that we may be able to better understand that black popular music at a specific historical moment provides us with an imperfect but nonetheless evocative index of African American cultural consciousness at the moment in question.

  All of this is to say, urban African American culture was neither monolithic nor completely autonomous or somehow free from European American musical and cultural influences. Religious, gender, and generational differences were just as important in mid-twentieth century African America as they were within the white world, even if widely shared racial and most often class characteristics produced fundamentally homogenous lived-experiences and core values. Surely, then, African American ghetto culture during the post-war period and the Civil Rights Movement years, and especially as found in black popular culture and black popular music in the 1950s and 1960s, was not—as many liberal, and many not-so-liberal, white sociologists have argued—a “pathological” or, even worse, “pathogenic” response to African Americans’ prolonged social predicament, racial oppression, and economic exploitation. Moreover, black ghetto culture during the post-war period and the Civil Rights Movement years was more than a fruitless attempt to apishly imitate the middle-class views and values of white America under less favorable conditions and in greatly reduced circumstances. On the contrary, it audaciously represented an unprecedented and wholly innovative act of agency on the part of working-class and poor black folk to construct an accessible and completely viable cultural arena for communal solidarity and individual achievement, while simultaneously recording and releasing the accumulated discontent and defiance in the face of, literally, centuries of domination and discrimination.

  Even more importantly, the African American worldview and the distinct culture it created over time, and through which it was able to evolve, was not inert, even as it firmly grounded itself and deepened its roots in the fertile soil of post-war black (and, to a certain extent, white) America. Needless to say, worldviews are transformed as people transform the world or, rather, as they appear to transform the world. As a consequence, the major modes of creation, re-creation, representation, and interpretation of the African American experience have changed with every apparent breakthrough and setback in African American life, culture, and struggle. The evolution and extraordinary popularity of rhythm & blues in the 1950s and 1960s revealed just such a process of re-creation and cultural adaptation to what many African Americans optimistically perceived to be the birth of a new era of “authentic” American democracy coupled with the requisite expanded opportunities.

  Understanding jump blues as an early form of rhythm & blues, it is important to acknowledge that rhythm & blues was the first form of black popular music to emerge during the post-World War II period. As such it became the first form of black popular music to be exposed to the unrestrained mass consumerism that defined the latter half of the twentieth century, and which continues to run rampant in the twenty-first century. With the introduction of the transistor radio in 1954, white youth had unbridled access to the new, hot, and often sensual sounds coming out of black America, which they previously had only limited access to as a consequence of their parents’ incessant surveillance of their musical and general listening choices. In fact, prior to the introduction of the television into mainstream American culture in the late 1940s and early 1950s, the old cumbersome radio console served as the undisputed centerpiece of suburban intra-familial entertainment.[27]

  In many ways rhythm & blues’ remarkable popularity in the 1950s was a double-edged sword. On the one hand, no matter what the songs were really about, suburban white youth developed a distinct tendency to embrace rhythm & blues exclusively as dance music (à la England’s Northern Soul Movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s). In most white youths’ minds classic rhythm & blues was the ultimate party and “make-out” music. Even though most of the lyrics revealed innocuous romantic ideas or registered a popular dance craze at the time, many of the messages in classic rhythm & blues alluded to the same subversive topics put forward in the spirituals during African American enslavement, chief among them commitments to African American freedom and unity, as well as African American spiritual and physical transcendence. Although less apparent than gospel and freedom songs, classic rhythm & blues carried over many of the core concepts ensconced in the spirituals and, much like classic blues, subtly secularized the ethos and aesthetics of the black sacred song tradition within the world of post-war black popular music (bear in mind that classic rhythm & blues is unambiguously the bedrock of each and every form of black popular music that arose in its aftermath: from rock & roll to soul, funk to disco, and rap to neo-soul).

  On the other hand, classic rhythm & blues bore the marks of Du Bois’s double-consciousness in light of the fact that its lyrics were impacted by African Americans’ precarious position at the low end of the U.S. social, political, cultural, and economic hierarchy. The truth is, in this instance quite similar to gospel and freedom songs during the Civil Rights Movement, the lyrics of classic rhythm & blues, once comprehended as part and parcel of a commodified commercial product, quite simply could not directly comment on the most pressing problems confronting black America at the time. However, with the Brown v. Board of Education victory and the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement in 1954, black America began to noticeably change, and as a consequence the content and style of the major forms of black popular music began to change as well, even if only subtly to the untrained eye and untrained ear. That is to say, where there may not have been a noticeable change in the lyrics of classic rhythm & blues, there was certainly an evident change in the sonics of classic rhythm & blues, and it is this seismic sonic shift that non-verbally encapsulated and enunciated the social, political, and cultural change afoot in African America that culminated with the Brown v. Board of Education victory and the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement in 1954.

  From 1954 through to the emergence of soul as the major black popular music in the mid-1960s, at its most resonant rhythm & blues not only registered the hardships and frustrations of urban African American life and its core views and values, but it also expressed African America’s most cherished post-war achievements and ongoing aspirations. Black popular culture, as with the more mainstream aspects of U.S. popular culture that African Americans embrace, serves a socio-political function when and where it offers an arena where African Americans can create and critique alternative views and values, as well as an arena where they can explore and express traditional African American views and values. In this sense, classic rhythm & blues reflected and increasingly articulated an idealized vision of not only loving and ultra-romantic African American relationships but also a united and harmonious African America which, truth be told, was more a figment of classic rhythm & blues singer-songwriters’ imaginatio
ns than a reality in the 1950s and 1960s.

  However, the classic rhythm & blues singer-songwriters were not alone in imagining a united and harmonious African America, they were merely translating and transmitting, indeed transfiguring, the post-war optimism, spirit of determination, and political pulse of the people then running rampant throughout African America into black popular music. In fact, for the first time since jazz simultaneously served as the soundtrack for both the New Negro Movement and the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s and 1930s, black popular music unambiguously and unapologetically served as the soundtrack for a black socio-political movement. Beginning with gospel, rhythm & blues, and the Civil Rights Movement and continuing through to rap, neo-soul, and the Hip Hop Movement, since the middle of the twentieth century every major form of black popular music has reflected and articulated, however incongruously, the core views and values of the major African American social and political movement of its era. And, even though it has been regularly ridiculed, rap continues to reflect and articulate the cultural maneuvers, micro-politics, and mini-movements of post-Civil Rights Movement and post-Black Power Movement African America.[28]

  Motown and the Civil Rights Movement: The Sound of Social Segregation and Sonic Integration

  At this point it might be safe to say that in terms of rhythm & blues serving as one of the major soundtracks for the Civil Rights Movement nothing drives this point home better than the triangular relationships between the Civil Rights Movement, the rise of Motown Records, and the inroads they both made in integrating black America into white America. Foreshadowing countless rap and neo-soul artists’ biographies, the iconic founder of Motown Records, Berry Gordy, dropped out of a Detroit high school in the eleventh grade with dreams of becoming a professional boxer. His boxing career was short-lived, as he was drafted by the U.S. Army to serve in the Korean War in 1950. It was in the army that Gordy obtained his General Educational Development (GED) certificate.

  Out of the army by 1953, Gordy gravitated toward music, especially jazz, regularly frequenting clubs and eventually opening up a record store, the 3-D Record Mart. In the 1950s jazz was becoming more and more an acquired taste, being eclipsed first by jump blues and then ultimately by rhythm & blues. Needless to say, Gordy’s “old hat” jazz-centered record store did not last long. However, it did pique his interest in songwriting, music production, and music promotion. Financially devastated by the failure of his record store Gordy was forced to work in the Lincoln-Mercury plant, making cars on the assembly line. It was a pivotal experience for him, and later he would model his record company on Detroit’s auto industry, attempting to achieve the same level of ingenuity, productivity and efficiency.[29]

  After writing a string of hits for Jackie Wilson (e.g., “Reet Petite,” “That Is Why [I Love You So], “I’ll Be Satisfied,” and “Lonely Teardrops”), Gordy created Anna Records in 1959 along with two of his sisters, Anna and Gwen Gordy, and his friend Billy Davis. In quick succession after Anna Records he established Tamla Records and later Jobete Music Publishing (named after his daughters: Joy, Betty, and Terry). On April 14, 1960, he incorporated his many music business ventures under the name the Motown Record Corporation (“Motown,” being a portmanteau of motor and town, is a well-known African American colloquialism for Detroit). Beginning with an artist roster that boasted classic rhythm & blues luminaries such as Smokey Robinson & the Miracles, Marv Johnson, Barrett Strong, Mable John, Eddie Holland, Mary Wells, and the Marvelettes, Gordy created what has been repeatedly referred to as “clean” or, rather, “polished” rhythm & blues records that increasingly owed as much to white pop as they did black pop. Even though he greatly respected the raunchier and more mature aspects of 1950s rhythm & blues, Motown Records’ rhythm & blues would emphasize anodyne youthful singers and songs, in effect deconstructing and reconstructing rhythm & blues to make it more palatable to a wider, whiter, and younger audience.[30]

  Motown artists in the 1960s were in many ways the antithesis of 1950s rhythm & blues artists. For instance, the contrasts between Smokey Robinson and Howlin’ Wolf, or Mary Wells and Big Maybelle, or Marv Johnson and Muddy Waters are obvious to anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear. But, Motown’s music was more than chocolate-covered pop fluff. By synthesizing black and white pop music, by coloring Motown songs with gospel beats and subdued church choir background singing, throbbing jazz-influenced bass lines, and blues-soaked guitar licks, Berry Gordy revolutionized rhythm & blues’ sonic palette. Whatever he lacked in terms of technical proficiency at singing or playing a musical instrument, there simply is no denying Gordy’s gargantuan sonic vision. In the 1960s Motown produced a wide range of music, all of which seemed to appeal to a broad audience and several different demographics. Ultimately, Motown created an extremely fluid and flexible sound—the much vaunted “Motown sound”—which, in the most unprecedented manner imaginable, allowed its music to have special meaning for, and appeal to mainstream pop music lovers and discerning black music lovers across the contentious regional, racial, cultural, social, political, and generational chasms afflicting America in the 1960s.[31]

  According to Nelson George, in Where Did Our Love Go?: The Rise & Fall of the Motown Sound (2007), Gordy “preferred jazz musicians for his sessions, believing that they were both more technically assured and more creative than their blues-based counterparts” (37). Most of Motown’s session musicians were actually local luminaries from Detroit’s jazz scene: pianists Joe Hunter, Richard “Popcorn” Wylie, Earl Van Dyke, and Johnny Griffith; guitarists Dave Hamilton, Joe Messina, Marvin Tarplin, Melvin “Wah-Wah Watson” Raglin, Robert White, Eddie Willis, and Dennis Coffey; bassists James Jamerson, Bob Babbitt, and Michael Henderson; drummers William “Benny” Benjamin, Uriel Jones, Richard “Pistol” Allen, and Frederick Waites; and percussionists Eddie “Bongo” Brown and Jack Ashford. To complement the supper club soul or uptown jazzy soul sound Gordy was going for, as early as 1960 he “hired members of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra to achieve the upscale R&B sounds” made popular by Nat King Cole, Ray Charles, Jackie Wilson, Sam Cooke, and Aretha Franklin during her Columbia Records years (39). The strings had the “whitening and lightening” effect, smoothing out the rough edges of Motown’s rhythm & blues and providing it with an identifiable sound virtually at the outset.[32]

  From Gordy’s point of view, black popular music, much like black people in the U.S. in the 1950s and 1960s, represented the recording industry’s “bastard child and mother lode, an aesthetic and economic contradiction that was institutionalized by white record executives” (50). Hence, Motown’s music became a metaphor for urban African American life, culture, and struggle in the 1960s. Gordy demonstrated to the American music industry, and eventually to the world, that African American youths were just like the “clean-cut” boy or girl next door, which was one of the major motifs of Motown’s music, and especially the classic recordings by Smokey Robinson & the Miracles, the Supremes, the Temptations, Mary Wells, Marvin Gaye, Tammi Terrell, Stevie Wonder, Kim Weston, the Marvelettes, the Four Tops, Gladys Knight & the Pips, and Martha Reeves & the Vandellas.

  As George observed, Motown made it clear that beneath “the glistening strings, Broadway show tunes, and relaxed vocal styles was a music of intense feeling” (50). Rhythm & blues, even the most “pop soul” sounding (à la Dionne Warwick, Walter Jackson, Barbara Lewis, Chuck Jackson, Maxine Brown, and Freddie Scott), was more than mere background music. It was a tool that could be used to break down barriers: musical, cultural, social, political, and economic barriers. Paralleling the emergence of the Civil Rights Movement, the rise of Motown sent a clear message to the white-dominated music industry: African Americans would no longer tolerate any form of segregation, neither social nor musical segregation. The message Motown sent to black America was equally provocative. Here was a company owned and operated by an African American armed only with a GED who challenged white corporate interests and white America’s perception of African Americans, especial
ly African American youths.

  There is a certain kind of sick and twisted irony at play when one seriously ponders the parallels between the emergence of the Civil Rights Movement and the rise of classic rhythm & blues, specifically Motown and Motown sound-derived rhythm & blues. In a nutshell, both the Civil Rights Movement and classic rhythm & blues, for all intents and purposes, were African American youth issues-centered and African American youth activism-centered. In terms of the Civil Rights Movement: the 1954 Brown vs. the Board of Education victory obviously focused on African American youth, as it desegregated public schools; the March 1955 arrest of fifteen year-old Claudette Colvin, who was the first person on record to resist bus segregation in Montgomery, Alabama, alerted many African American adults to the adverse impact that segregation was having on African American youth and made many commit to the then inchoate Civil Rights Movement; the August 1955 lynching of fourteen year-old Emmett Till in Money, Mississippi, enraged even the most moderate African American adults, providing yet another reason to rise up against American apartheid; the September 1957 display of courage on the part of the “Little Rock Nine” (Melba Pattillo Beals, Minnijean Brown, Elizabeth Eckford, Ernest Green, Gloria Ray Karlmark, Carlotta Walls LaNier, Thelma Mothershed, Terrence Roberts, and Jefferson Thomas) as they integrated the all-white Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, flanked by gun-toting National Guardsmen clearly made even more freedom-loving folk commit to the principles and practices of the Civil Rights Movement; the August 1958 sit-ins spearheaded by Clara Luper and the NAACP Youth Council accented the brimming youth activism in the Civil Rights Movement, as did the 1960 emergence of a full-blown Sit-In Movement led by African American college students (Diane Nash, James Bevel, Bernard Lafayette, and C. T. Vivian); the May 1961 initiation of the Freedom Riders Movement, primarily led by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), ratcheted up youth radicalism during the movement years; the May 1963 Children’s Crusade, led by James Bevel, in Birmingham, Alabama, accented even more youth issues and youth activism in the Civil Rights Movement; and certainly the September 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church that took the lives of the schoolgirls Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Cynthia Wesley, and Carole Robertson two weeks after the March on Washington sent shock waves through African America and helped to kick the Civil Rights Movement into an even higher gear. Again, African American youth—their lives and struggles—were squarely at the center of the Civil Rights Movement.[33]