Marvin Gaye didn’t make it. The last years of his life disintegrated into a hell of self-doubt and withdrawal. When he was shot and killed by his father, it seemed all too emblematic of what had happened in black America since the sixties. Part of the story I’m telling has to do with lost hope, the death of the dream shared by Martin Luther King, Ella Baker, Malcolm X, and the hundreds of thousands who responded to their calls. When you look at the personal stories of the men and women who created the music, there’s a temptation to sign on with the cynics.
Too many have died. Sam Cooke, Flo Ballard of the Supremes, Jimi Hendrix, Phyllis Hyman, John Coltrane, Janis Joplin, Elvis, Dinah Washington, Tupac Shakur, Kurt Cobain, Motown’s brilliant bass player James Jamerson, Jim Morrison, Tammi Terrell, Peter Tosh, Memphis drummer Al Jackson, DJ Scott LaRock, Sylvester, John Lennon, Biggie Smalls, Otis Redding, Bob Marley, Donny Hathaway. The deaths of the stars sometimes obscure the many thousands gone whose names most of us don’t know. The names lined up in military rows on the black marble walls of the Vietnam memorial, the names embroidered in the heartbreaking and celebratory squares of the AIDS quilt, the names of the young black men in the newspaper reports of drive-by shootings, the women whose lives are destroyed by rape and abuse. It doesn’t detract from our sadness over Tupac or Donny Hathaway or Marvin Gaye, to understand their deaths as part of a larger tragedy.
But the music insists that tragedy isn’t the whole story. A Change Is Gonna Come seeks out moments of resistance, celebration, joy. It’s important to savor even the momentary victories, to remember what worked and why. To adapt the lessons to the changing world we’ll encounter tomorrow and the day after. To understand that the struggle for love and justice will be a long one, but that, for anyone who resists the notion that humanity can be measured in dollars, it’s what makes life worth living. Even as we mourn the dead, it’s crucial that we honor the living, the elders who have shown us the path and the new voices who continue to explore how to keep it real: George Clinton, Aretha Franklin, Rakim, John Fogerty, Stevie Wonder, Cassandra Wilson, Prince, Dianne Reeves, Al Green, Dorothy Love Coates, KRS-One, Mavis Staples, Bruce Springsteen, Curtis Mayfield.
In the course of writing this book, I was privileged to speak with many of the musicians who have given the music its meaning. All of them insisted that music can help bring the world back into harmony. Charles Wright of the Watts 103rd Street Rhythm Band, best known for “Express Yourself,” stated the shared feeling with unmistakable intensity: “Our purpose is to try to keep the healing process going. I want to make music of the nature of the healing heart. Music has to do with the heart and the bloodstream.” Like many who have watched the changes in America since the sixties, Wright fears for the future: “I feel like we’re missing out, like we’re going in the wrong direction. Music has to turn it back in the right direction. If we don’t then the world is on its way to doom.”
When Mavis Staples echoes Wright, she’s drawing on her long experience in the worlds of gospel, soul, and popular music. “It’s healing, music is healing,” testifies one of the few artists who can claim to have traveled the gospel highway during the sixties, had number one soul hits in the seventies, and recorded with Prince in the nineties. Mavis’s belief that the key to realizing music’s healing power lies in an understanding of history carries special weight: “We have a history that needs to be known. We have been through some stuff and the world needs to know about it. The stories need to be known to the young people so they can know what we’ve gone through to get them to where they are.”
My deepest hope is that A Change Is Gonna Come spreads some of those stories in a way that helps the healing begin. My primary regret is that I simply don’t have room to tell all the stories that have made a difference to me. A Change Is Gonna Come concentrates on the public dimension of the story. Whenever I’ve had to decide what to include and what to leave out, I’ve gone with the better-known music, in part because real dialogue requires a shared vocabulary. One of the costs of this approach is that I spend much less time writing about jazz than I spend listening to it. As I wrote this book, I frequently went to Charles Mingus’s music, especially “Meditations on Integration” and “Haitian Fight Song,” to renew my spiritual energy and intellectual focus. An intensely introspective man, Mingus knew that even the loneliest work takes its meaning from how it relates to the larger world. Capturing the complicated energy of the freedom movement, “Haitian Fight Song” provides a way of thinking about the relationship between intellectual work and social movements. Alone and confused, Mingus gathers his thoughts and begins to test his voice in the bass solo that opens the piece. Gradually other instruments enter, echoing phrases, helping Mingus figure out what works and what doesn’t. A compelling rhythm takes shape and Mingus moves out into a public world, calling his community to join in the struggle. The rhythm changes, staggers, regains its focus, encounters resistance, but always moves ahead. As Mahalia Jackson sang in one of her most powerful songs, “Keep your hand on the plow.” What it’s all about is setting ourselves and our people in motion on what the Staple Singers called the “Freedom Highway.”
It’s a model and a vision that helped me through the difficult stages of writing A Change Is Gonna Come. Often people asked me why a white boy from the Rocky Mountains was spending so much energy, and felt so much passion, for music that wasn’t, in any simple sense, his own. Sometimes I responded by quoting what John Fogerty said when I asked him a similar question, “I wasn’t born on Tibet or Mars.” This is the music I’ve heard all my life. Sometimes I talked about the fact that I grew up in a home where the freedom movement was taken seriously, where democratic values weren’t just words. But the real answer is A Change Is Gonna Come itself. The answer isn’t a stock phrase, it’s a story, the kind of story Mingus tells in “Haitian Fight Song.” It’s a story about how individual voices find their truest tones when they commune with others, how we come to terms with our limits, share our insights, band together to try and change the world. In “Haitian Fight Song,” Mingus creates a complicated soundworld where the voice he found in darkness undergoes changes as other voices enter and leave, in frustration and in triumph. His meaning is clear: We can never separate who we are from the people around us. Their fate is our own.
Acknowledgments
A Change Is Gonna Come represents a momentary pause in a series of interlinking conversations about music that began on the streets of Colorado Springs with Brian Berry, Mike DeLong, Kent Lawyer, and Jim Allen. It’s a conversation that has been enriched by the voices of Steve Schultz, Dan Schultz, Michael and Keisha Bowman, Shanna Greene, Donia Allen, David Wright, Gloria Abney, Brian Bischel, Mikki Harris, Yorel Lashley, Duer Sharp, Bill Van Deburg, Kevin Stewart, Mike Reese, Karah Stokes, Mike Allen, Steve Baker, Aja Brown, Sam Chaltain, Tess Scogans, Yasmin Cader, Barbara Ewell, Jerry Speir, Ben Fisher, Eli Goldblatt, Trudi Witonsky, Craig McConnell, Sue Christel, Richard Powers, Nellie McKay, Ron Radano, Sandy Adell, Anthony Stockdale, Malin Pereira, and many others, including the folks down at the Harmony Bar. Missy Kubitschek and Barbara Talmadge will know why this book closes a circle with a long circumference.
For the last decade, the most important part of the conversation for me has grown out of the classes I teach on black music at the University of Wisconsin. The students of Afro-American Studies 156 and 403 have taught me far more than they could possibly have learned. Special thanks to Eric Schumacher-Rasmussen, Ed Pavlic, Melvina Johnson Young, Glenn Berry, Gant Johnson, Scott Sherman, and Lori Leibovich, all of whom taught me to hear the beauty in what I’d sometimes thought was noise. As always, I have been blessed with a wonderful family: my father, my brothers, Brian and Blake, the Nelson clan that’s somehow gotten used to me, and my nieces and nephews. My deepest love to my wife, Leslee Nelson, and our daughters, Riah and Kaylee.
I owe a lot to Dave Marsh for helping A Change Is Gonna Come become what it is. Among many other things, Dave put me in contact with Greil Marcus, Jon Landau, and Danny Alexander, who provided