No one did more to bring the power of the words together with the underlying power of the music than Fannie Lou Hamer, SNCC field secretary from 1963 to 1967 and cofounder of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, which challenged the state’s segregationist delegation to the 1964 party convention in Atlantic City. At rallies, demonstrations, and SNCC meetings, Hamer used songs to bring her audience to a sense of connection. One of her favorites was “This Little Light of Mine,” another way of phrasing her best-known words: “I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired.” One MFDP member described the political impact of her songs: “When Mrs. Hamer finishes singing a few freedom songs one is aware that he has truly heard a fine political speech, stripped of the usual rhetoric and filled with the anger and determination of the civil rights movement.”
Both in its political contexts and its more strictly musical settings, call and response moves the emphasis from the individual to the group. For African American performance to work, the performer must receive a response, whether the rallying of the beloved community around the women who were redefining everyone as leaders, the chaotic participation of the crowd greeting the landing of George Clinton’s P-Funk mothership, or the intense concentration—punctuated by cries of “Yes Lord!” and “Tell it!”—that the Washington audience gave Martin and Mahalia. At its core, call and response is the African American form of critical analysis, a process that draws on the experience and insights of the entire community. The individual maintains a crucial role; a carefully crafted call can lead to the best, most useful insights. But the individual does not necessarily, or ideally, maintain control.
Mahalia linked her style with that of the pulpit, emphasizing the way both responded to their people’s moan: “It is the basic way that I sing today, from hearing the way the preacher would sort of sing in a—I mean, would preach in a cry, in a moan, would shout sort of, like in a chant way—a groaning sound which would penetrate to my heart.” When the preacher or singer shapes a call, it is already a response to the shared suffering of the community. If the members of the congregation or audience recognize their own experiences in the call, they respond. The simplest response consists of an “amen,” but responses can also call on the preacher to consider something he’s overlooked—the role of the sisters, for example—or challenge the singer to take it deeper, make it real. In its pure form, call and response can exist only in the interaction between people present with one another in the real world. But the underlying dynamic can be re-created in various ways. On many of Mahalia’s greatest records, Mildred Falls’s piano models the response of an aware congregation, walking at her side in the valley of despair, urging her up toward the mountaintop, letting her know, in good times and bad, that she isn’t alone. On record, background singers or choirs stand in for the community in the world. The best gospel records always sound live, because they capture the uncontainable energy unleashed by call and response, even if they were recorded in studios. The producers and musicians who turned gospel into Chicago soul and Motown never forgot the principle. The calls and responses between Curtis Mayfield and the Impressions came straight from the churches of Chicago’s South Side; Smokey Robinson and the Miracles re-created the dialogue between Claude Jeter and the Swan Silvertones. And those sounds had their origins in the slave songs and coded spirituals crafted in the centuries-old struggle for freedom. I second that emotion.
4
Motown:Money, Magic, and the Mask
The story of Motown is almost as familiar as the story of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s movement. And just about as trustworthy. The standard version goes something like this. A bunch of poor Detroit natives led by Berry Gordy, Jr., and Smokey Robinson decide it doesn’t make any sense that black folks aren’t making any money off their music. Paying careful attention to the most successful mainstream labels, they round up the local talent and put out about sixteen thousand number one singles. Motown helps realize the dreams of upward-bound black kids looking to get over like everyone else. White folks open their arms wide to embrace the Supremes, the Four Tops, the Temptations, Martha and the Vandellas, Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, and the Jackson Five. Everybody gets rich and, having put an end to cultural segregation, moves to L.A. No one has to think too much about desolation row. Or, for that matter, look very far for a sound track for a nostalgic movie about the sixties. It’s the most compelling version of the American dream ever released in blackface.
Like the standard version of King’s movement, it’s not entirely wrong. Berry Gordy was certainly trying to cash in on the popularity of black music; the company slogan—”the sound of young America”—told a good bit of the truth. Some of the main players got rich, and most of them made a hell of a lot more money than anyone growing up in black Detroit could have reasonably expected. But if the public image of the movement misrepresents the deeper sources of its strength, the Motown myth obscures some hard truths about how money can undercut gospel politics.
In different ways, gospel and Motown exemplify the underlying drive of black culture in the fifties and sixties. Literary critic Robert Stepto labels the drive “ascent,” observing that ever since the days of folk tales and slave spirituals, black expression has placed a central emphasis on the interdependence of freedom and literacy. Black leaders from Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth to Malcolm X and Jesse Jackson have said it over and over: No literacy, no freedom.
But literacy is more complicated than the basic ability to read and write. Becoming literate means learning to play the game by the real rules. You can’t believe what the white world says about how things work. You have to be smart enough to play the game within the game if you want to have any real chance of making it. Part of literacy involves knowing when to put up a good front, when to claim the moral high ground while you’re busy greasing palms. Not that ascent counsels cynicism. Handled carefully, the financial part of ascent maintains its link to communal freedom. The trick is to get paid without selling your people.
Stepto sets up a “symbolic geography” of black life based on the movement from the slavery of the “symbolic South” to the relative—but never absolute—freedom of the “symbolic North.” In slavery times, the movement was literal; Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad carried people up from the slave states to free soil. By the time Berry Gordy, Jr., and Martin Luther King, Jr., appeared on the scene, however, history had complicated the geography. Mississippi remained as far South as it had been a century before, but now it was clear that Harlem, Chicago’s South Side, and Boston’s Roxbury were North in name only. The cities that their parents had envisioned as “the promised land,” second-generation immigrants now laughingly referred to as “up South.” The North could be a seat in a classroom at Central High School in Little Rock or at the front of the bus in Montgomery. But it could also be a house in a redlined area of middle-class Chicago.
For Berry Gordy, the North was located in the Top 40 charts, just across the Jim Crow line from the “Race” or “R & B” charts. The North was where they kept the money. Describing the situation just before the founding of Motown, Gordy reflected on the record industry he was about to transform:
In the music business there had long been the distinction between black and white music, the assumption being that R&B was black and Pop was white. But with Rock ‘n’ Roll and the explosion of Elvis those clear distinctions began to get fuzzy. Elvis was a white artist who sang black music. What was it? (a) R&B, (b) Country, (c) Pop, (d) Rock ‘n’ Roll or (e) none of the above.
If you picked C you were right, that is, if the record sold a million copies. “Pop” means popular and if that ain’t, I don’t know what is. I never gave a damn what else it was called.
Although Gordy shared his awareness of money with numerous other black musicians, he had a unique ability to play the game as it’s really played. The stories of Mahalia Jackson and James Brown serve as cautionary tales concerning the costs of failing to master the unwritten rules. Mahalia’s obsession with money eventually alienated her from many of her closest friends. Throughout her career, she performed only after she’d been paid in cash. At times, she carried up to $15,000 in her bra, which led to some extremely tense moments when she was pulled