The Michael Eric Dyson Reader

by Michael Eric Dyson

  Twenty-Eight

  ARETHA FRANKLIN, VANESSA BELL ARMSTRONG, AND ME

  This is my ode to two of the greatest voices of the twentieth century. As it happens, both hail from my hometown, giving them even greater resonance in my world. While Queen of Soul Aretha Franklin has rightfully been crowned a Hegelian world-historical genius of black sound, gospel great Vanessa Bell Armstrong, another Detroit sonic marvel, deserves far wider recognition. I first heard Aretha Franklin’s voice as a youth who, besides reading, listened to the radio to connect me to the broader world. Since the transistor trumped the tube for me, Aretha’s voice was the sound track to my burgeoning adolescence. Her wails, shrieks, moans, and piercing cries urged me to see the depth and range of female emotion— and to accept its moral authority. In this essay, I recall in detail how I first came across Vanessa Bell Armstrong’s throbbing, pulsing gift, and how I treasured its regal unleashing before my very eyes and ears on foreign shores. This chapter from Why I Love Black Women was a sheer pleasure to write. It embodies my profound appreciation for how the voices of black women have rung clearly in my head to guide my path to manhood.

  “LISTEN BROTHER, YOU’VE GOT TO COME OVER HERE RIGHT NOW,” my friend and fellow church member James Pippin excitedly demanded after I answered the phone.

  “What’s wrong, Pip?” I anxiously replied. “You all right?”

  “Man, I’ve got a copy of an album by a gospel singer who’s gonna give Aretha a run for her money,” Pippin goaded me. He knew Aretha Franklin, the Queen of Soul, was revered in my heart and that her pretty tones and thrilling shrieks often vibrated the walls of my small apartment. I didn’t have to tell him that to me his egregious comparison was sacrilegious.

  “Look, bro, you don’t have to get all hyperbolic,” I defensively responded. “If you want me to come over, man, just say so. I’ll see you as soon as I can get there.” “Oh, by the way, she’s from Detroit.” He got in a final tease, chuckling as he clicked the receiver to its base.

  Pippin was double-dipping in disaster. First, he had the nerve to challenge the Queen’s throne. And if that wasn’t bad enough, he attempted to exploit my native passions by pitting one homegirl against the next, and worse yet, a seasoned veteran—no, the reigning champion—against an untested newcomer. Nevertheless, I hopped into my wife’s white mustang and made my way to Pippin’s house. On the long drive over, I couldn’t help but think of how big a presence Aretha had been in my life, how her voice had hovered over me and marked every stage of my transition from boy to man.

  To the world beyond the church, Aretha’s freakish precocity seemed to emerge fully formed from obscure origins in the Detroit neighborhood where her father, C. L. Franklin, a noted preacher, brought her up. In fact, it was in Rev. Franklin’s legendary rhetorical womb that Aretha gestated before hatching her monumental talent. As a bronze gospel wunderkind, Aretha’s gift poured out in a theological prescience so striking that her father, a past master himself of the far-flung ecstasies and esoteric vibrations of the black voice, must have felt that a double portion of the Spirit, his spirit, had fallen on his woman-child. One can hear fourteenyear-old Aretha on her first gospel recording declaring with unforced believability that she was heading to a place where she would “Never Grow Old.” Like all great artists, Aretha was not so much speaking to us as speaking for us, at least for the fortunate phalanx gathered at her father’s New Bethel Baptist Church where the recording took place. In Aretha’s mouth, the gospel standard temporarily dissolved its yearning for a distant heaven and seized her youthful form to embody its promise right now.

  My love for Aretha was inherited from my mother, who frequented New Bethel when she arrived in Detroit from the South. Rev. C. L. Franklin was a “down-home” preacher, a lionized pulpiteer whose homilies spread over seventy-six recordings that found wide circulation in black communities throughout the nation. Ironically, I had to go all the way to the country—to the Alabama farm of my grandparents on which my mother was reared and where she picked cotton—to hear for the first time the oratorical wizardry of a Detroit icon. I listened raptly and repeatedly to Franklin’s rhetorical gifts churning through my grandfather’s archaic portable record player. He possessed a powerful voice with a remarkably wide range. Franklin could effortlessly ascend to his upper register to squeal and squall. He was equally capable of descending to a more moderate vocal hum and pitch, and then, at a moment’s notice, he could recompose in dramatic whisper. The velocity of his speech was no less impressive, too. Franklin was the greatest exemplar of “whooping,” or the “chanted sermon,” where ministers coarsen their articulation, deliberately and skillfully stress their vocal cords, and transition from spoken word to melodious speech. He was the shining emblem of folk poetry shaped in the mouth of a minister whose mind was spry and keen. Franklin’s style rarely undercut his substance.

  Mama said that often, after Franklin finished his sermons, Aretha would rise and escalate the spirit to even more frenzied highs. Years later, after searching for a style to accommodate the magnitude of her art, Aretha would do the same in the secular realm. She carried into the universe beyond revival tents and sanctuary walls a religious passion for worldly subjects, among them the flourishing and failure of love affairs, and the pleasures of the senses. When Aretha switched from gospel to rhythm and blues, she followed a path carved by such luminaries as Ray Charles and Sam Cooke. Because of their struggles, she didn’t have to confront the same degree of reproach they had endured. But she encountered her share of resentment and anger among the faithful who believed that she had betrayed her first love and highest calling. These same folk didn’t understand that when Aretha turned Otis Redding’s song “Respect” into a quasi-feminist manifesto, she was, intentionally or not, signifying on the lack of regard she faced as a woman in all her homes, secular and sacred. While women largely filled its gospel choirs and sanctuary seats, the church remained, in its powers, discretions, and privileges, a man’s world. Of course, so was the world outside the church, but at least women didn’t lose their dignity or self-worth by being asked to believe that God made it so.

  Not even Aretha’s successful reentries into the gospel world of her youth, one in 1972, the other fifteen years later, have completely silenced the displeasure with her defection among those old enough to remember it. Since her departure, there has been an unspoken search for the next Aretha, for a successor who would stay the course and sing only for the Lord. Neither would her critics be mollified by C. L. Franklin’s adroitly defensive claim on Aretha’s 1972 gospel album, Amazing Grace, that his daughter “never really left the church.”

  I kept this debate in mind as I pulled up to Pippin’s brick house. Pippin and I had weathered some hard times under the same umbrella. I had come to Knoxville in 1979 to begin my freshman year at Knoxville College, a month shy of my twenty-first birthday. As a newly minted minister, I sought out a church home where I could stimulate my faith and exercise my gifts, and I landed at the Mount Zion Baptist Church. Pippin, an older, wiser big brother, often gave me a lift to church since he worked nearby as a manager and disc jockey at a tiny radio station. He also occasionally played percussions in a local combo.

  Still, we were both poor. I preached wherever and whenever I could. Pippin worked his various gigs to better financial effect, but it didn’t take much to top the $50 I received on a good day for a guest sermon. We often dined at “all-you-can-eat” buffets, going in early, eating late breakfasts and early lunches, then remaining to read papers and shoot the bull until we got hungry again for supper. Pippin also shared with me promotional copies of forthcoming albums and tapes that he received at the radio station. That’s how he came across this vaunted Aretha successor.

  “Come on in, man,” Pippin greeted me at the door. “Gerri took the baby to visit Mother Rosalyn, so we’ve got the house to ourselves.”

  Gerri was Pip’s wife and a fantastic gospel singer and pianist in her own right. Before I’d gotten married for
the second time, Gerri, Pip, and I hung out regularly, and she agreeably joined in many of our shenanigans.

  “Now who’s this singer you want me to hear?” I quizzed Pippin as I rested my coat but not my questions. “Is she Baptist or Pentecostal? What church did she attend? If she’s so bad, how come I ain’t never heard of her, and I’m from Detroit?”

  “Take a chill pill and cool out, bro,” Pippin calmly deflected my hazing. “I’m gonna play her for you right now. I guarantee you that you’ll be blown away.”

  I suppose if Pippin’s discovery had taken place in our more sophisticated technological era—a quick download and file sharing over the Internet—the mystery could have been quickly solved. Back then, in 1984, in a failed Orwellian future, we had to do it the old-fashioned way: stand before “The Stereo” and place the stylus over the rotating, compressed wax and allow the analog vibrations to brush across our soundscape and through our nearly busted woofers and tweeters.

  As the familiar crackles and snaps surged through the speakers, and the needle rapidly unraveled the tightly configured lines on the album’s black face—and no matter how expertly you cleaned your vinyl disc it was bound to emit faint noises from a sharp object impressing a moving, flat surface—the turntable gyrated the first few seconds of Pippin’s latest find. I was unimpressed. It started with the synthesized sound of rushing wind. It was quickly followed by four strident, graduated chords hammered by a cheesy synthesizer, underwritten by a scaling piano smothered in the faux-symphonic bluster of organ and chimes. A hokey effect from an amateur outfit, I glibly, caustically concluded. I was slouched in my chair.

  Then her voice broke in.

  “Master,” she began in an understated, clear alto declaration, delaying her next words so we could fix our minds on the meaning of her lyrics as the piano pounded out her deliberate pace. “The temp-ehhhhhhhhhest is rayging.” Now I had straightened my posture and leaned in as if to grab every syllable as it spilled through the thinly wired netting of Pippin’s stereo speakers. My delighted host was grinning like a Cheshire cat. The singer slid up the word “tempest” like a plane effortlessly gliding into air, except she met self-induced sonic turbulence halfway through. But she navigated her voice expertly amidst the deliberate gruffness she evoked to stress the storm she was singing about. When she phrased “tempest” as she did, she was skillfully performing what might be termed vernacular onomatopoeia. Her volcanic melisma dissolved peacefully into “raging”—an irony, to be sure, as she contrasted, even opposed, the stormy condition she described by drawing her voice back, at least for the present, into a serenely reassuring soprano. I was intrigued. After singing about the billows tossing high in a steady voice, she got guttural and let loose a minor vocal eruption as she raced up the scale in quaking glissando, telling us the sky was “oh-oh-h-hh-vershadow-w-w-w-ed with blackness,” with “black-ness” crisply and succinctly articulated.

  On and on it went, as the singer unleashed growling, groaning, lacerating syllables in wild succession, occasionally stopping on a dime to accentuate the inherent drama of her subject with an equally theatrical delivery. Okay, I thought, maybe she has some Aretha-like ways, but I wasn’t yet convinced she could hang with the Queen. That is, until the middle of the song. She gave voice to a series of otherworldly ejaculations that in their sheer force seemed to bend back the cast-iron sleeves on Pippin’s radiator. She built slowly to a pattern of repeating, swelling crescendos that only intermittently resolved in sweetly whispered affirmations of God’s peace in the midst of the storm. She rained down such ferocious assurances of divine intervention, that the storm from which she promised God’s protection seemed my only refuge.

  There was no room in Pippin’s house to hide from her voice, no spot untouched by her vibrations, no plane unaffected by her seismic emissions, no space uninhabited by her shaking, shouting, shivering, shearing sound. She unleashed an eviscerating orchestration of notes to proclaim Jesus as “the Master, I’m talkin’ ‘bout the Mas-turhhh”—and mind you, she’s wailing at the tip-top of her surging soprano—“of erher-herrrrrth and sky.” She wasn’t finished. “You see”—and in the background, the choir in staccato affirmation picks up her cue and chants “the oh-cean,” before she picks back up and finishes the thought—“ohhhhhhhhohhhhhohhh so sweet-lay, obey, they gonna obey, thy we-ee-ill.” I was all but done. She had led me to the highest point of her shattering articulation and suddenly, precipitously dropped me off a cliff of cascading sound into an ocean of humming tranquility. I could only slump in my seat and let her soothing, hushing, calming benediction roll over me as she and her choir called antiphonally for “pee-e-e-eee-e-e-eee-e-e-e-uh-yeece.” For the next thirty or so minutes, I was thrilled and thrashed by the merciless wave of sounds that alternately tiptoed and tore from Pippin’s speakers. In that time, I met Aretha’s sonic daughter, her gospel twin. It wasn’t that their voices were necessarily the same in construction—although they shared similarities of tone, pitch, and style at points. But they were identical in effect, since both possessed a mesmerizing, tantalizing, enthralling gift that demanded notice.

  I had no idea as I sat in Pippin’s house, transfixed by a voice that I didn’t believe could exist—and perhaps, didn’t believe should exist—that six years later I would meet its owner as we journeyed together to London with Jesse Jackson. Like me, Jackson had heard that voice and was immediately smitten. He invited me into his office one day early in 1990—I was working with him on his autobiography—and he enthusiastically located a track on a gospel compact disc he had just received.

  “Listen to this, Reverend, and tell me she ain’t awesome,” Jackson elatedly beseeched me. As soon as I heard her voice—that voice—I smiled.

  “Yeah, she’s incredible, amazing, Rev,” I replied. “I’ve played all three of her albums to death.”

  I didn’t tell him the story of how we’d met, that voice and me, years earlier in Pippin’s house. But I told her when we enjoyed downtime in England. We’d gone there with Jackson—me as his shadow amanuensis, she as his soloist, as he talked and preached his way around London—to help celebrate Mandela’s release from prison, and to join in his campaign to keep the pressure on South Africa to end apartheid through sanctions from the world community. Toward that end, Jackson would meet with the Mandelas at the London home of deposed African National Congress leader Oliver Tambo, attend the Wembley Stadium concert for the recently released hero, and, well, just be Jesse Jackson. And that meant that Jackson would give sermons and speeches to galvanize international support for South African freedom and black self-determination.

  When Jackson preached, she sang, and amazed the folk. She belted out gospel ballads and gospel blues, reveling in contemporary and traditional, soulful and jazzy, and even hipper, up-to-date songs dipped in the aesthetic fashions of black pop music. She even wowed the rapturously raucous black crowd in Brixton, so much so that Winnie Mandela grabbed her backstage and lifted her clean off the ground, no mean feat in light of the singer’s compact, substantial frame. And I remember thinking that as much as I admired Mrs. Mandela, she wasn’t a woman I’d ever want to tangle with.

  Back at our hotel, I regaled the singer with the story of how I’d first heard her, and how utterly powerful and riveting an occasion it had been. A wide, beautiful smile broke across her attractive brown-doll face, set off by intense button eyes, apple-red cheeks, and framed by lush, layered, reddish brown hair. She was cute as pie and twice as sweet.

  I reached into my garment bag and retrieved a copy of her first album, Peace Be Still, the one that Pippin had snagged me with, which she happily signed for me, ending with a common valedictory that still touched me deeply, “Love, Vanessa Bell Armstrong.”

  Twenty-Nine

  THE GREAT NEXT: JAZZ ORIGINS AND THE ANATOMY OF IMPROVISATION

  This interview, conducted by talented directors Maria Agui Carter and Calvin A. Lindsay Jr., was originally videotaped for a 1999 PBS hour-long documentary the pair directe
d, “The Devil’s Music.” Their documentary was one installment of a four-part series on transgressive art entitled Culture Shock. “The Devil’s Music” addresses the evolution of jazz in the ’20s as a demonized musical genre to its worldwide celebration today as America’s only genuine art form. Since I am usually asked to speak about hip-hop and rhythm and blues, it was a marvelous aesthetic departure for me. This interview permitted me to speak at length about the origins and expressions of a music I have loved for a long time. Since most of what I had to say met the cutting-room floor (how else could it be for an interview that was longer than the documentary itself?), it was a real treat when I got the chance to publish the entire interview—the equivalent of a jazz jam session between me and my interlocutors—in Open Mike.

  How did the music achieve and get assigned such lofty goals?

  When you think about 1920s jazz music, you think about what led up to it. The formative period of jazz is from around 1895 till about 1905, 1910. Ragtime was big then. The music was so named because of the ragged time, the syncopated rhythmic structures, that African-inspired musicians were playing against more nonsyncopated, linear, tonal-based, harmonic European music. Musically speaking, jazz evolved out of ragtime with the assertion of the sensibilities of African communal spirits and syncopated rhythmic orders against the more regimented order of Western music. Aesthetically speaking, high society music, the music of civil and polite society performed in the chambers of the elite, was the established canon, the established norm against which all other music was judged and compared.

  When ragtime came along with its raggedy, nonconventional, syncopated rhythms against the nonsyncopated, linear conceptions of music in the Western canon, it created a real rub. But I think part of the controversy erupted in response to the function of the music itself. Musicians handed out cards in New Orleans, especially in the 1920s, which had printed on them “music for all occasions.” So the social contexts and geographical spaces to which the music was Jazz consigned determined its function. If you’re playing in parades and picnics and funerals and Mardi Gras, the music is much more lively and syncopated and fit for those situations. But if the music is played in a limited, intimate space, the music has a different sensibility. Even the popular dances of the 1920s reflected the influence of space on aesthetics. For instance, in polite society they danced the quadrille, the mazurka, the waltz, and the polka in association with chamber music. But when there were open spaces and markedly vibrant dance halls, all characteristic of the sites of “the folk,” the dances were the slow drag, the eagle rock, and the buzzard lope. All in all, the music and dance outside “official” society—and music and dance were intimately connected—reflected the infusion of African aesthetic values by means of New Orleans Creoles.