Four years (or what seems like a life­time) ago, con­tro­ver­sy erupt­ed over the cast­ing of actress Zoe Sal­dana, with dark­ened skin, as icon­ic pianist and singer Nina Simone in the biopic Nina. Accu­sa­tions of racism and col­orism met the film, his­tor­i­cal atti­tudes hun­dreds of years in the mak­ing that Simone her­self fought through­out her career, espe­cial­ly after she joined the Civ­il Rights move­ment in the 1960s and active­ly made her per­son­al strug­gles with racism cen­tral to her polit­i­cal state­ments.

“You can­not under­stand Nina Simone’s life and lega­cy with­out tak­ing stock of her iden­ti­ty as a dark-skinned black woman,” says Vox’s Vic­to­ria Massie. “That fact was inex­tri­ca­bly linked to her life’s tra­jec­to­ry, her art and her politics—to every­thing that made Nina fear­less­ly and unapolo­get­i­cal­ly Nina.” Her daugh­ter Simone Kel­ly put it this way:

We all have a sto­ry. My moth­er suf­fered. We can go all the way back to when she was a child and peo­ple told her her nose was too big, her skin was too dark, her lips were too wide. It’s very impor­tant the world acknowl­edges my moth­er was a clas­si­cal musi­cian whose dreams were not real­ized because of racism.

Simone car­ried the wounds of those expe­ri­ences through­out her life, and she sought to heal them through music that affirmed the expe­ri­ence of oth­er young, dark-skinned girls who faced sim­i­lar obsta­cles.

The out­stand­ing nar­ra­tive “Four Women,” from 1966’s Wild is the Wind, artic­u­lates the dif­fer­ent treat­ment its char­ac­ters receive based on skin col­or. The Vil­lage Voice’s Thu­lani Davis called the song “an instant­ly acces­si­ble analy­sis of the damn­ing lega­cy of slav­ery.” The famous “To Be Young, Gift­ed and Black,” writ­ten for Simone’s friend and men­tor Lor­raine Hans­ber­ry, became an anthem of the Civ­il Rights move­ment in the 1970s.

Years lat­er, in “Col­or is a Beau­ti­ful Thing,” Simone revis­it­ed the theme in a short, repet­i­tive one-minute piece that is instant­ly sing-along-able. The song comes from her 1982 album Fod­der on My Wings, just re-released last month by Verve. “Col­or is a Beau­ti­ful Thing” is per­fect­ly tai­lored for young chil­dren, who will respond with joy not only to Simone’s rol­lick­ing piano but to the beau­ti­ful­ly ani­mat­ed video above.

Fod­der on My Wings is an over­looked album, Shel­don Pearce writes at Pitch­fork, “about per­son­al freedom—about lib­er­at­ing her­self from her past and find­ing the lib­er­ty to cre­ate as she pleased. It was Simone’s means of work­ing through fear—of death, manip­u­la­tion, dis­crim­i­na­tion.” In the lin­er notes, she her­self writes, “What I did on this album was try to get myself deep into joy.”

The method above is mantra-like, the song’s refrain “like some­thing she’s try­ing to inter­nal­ize, a coda to 1969’s ‘To Be Young, Gift­ed and Black.” Simone nev­er seemed to over­come her own pain, but her gift—in addi­tion to her musi­cal brilliance—was to freely share the lessons she learned in the strug­gle, the bit­ter and the sweet, and to teach new gen­er­a­tions of artists.

via The Kids Should See This

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Nina Simone Became Hip Hop’s “Secret Weapon”: From Lau­ryn Hill to Jay Z and Kanye West

Watch a New Nina Simone Ani­ma­tion Based on an Inter­view Nev­er Aired in the U.S. Before

Watch Nina Simone Sing the Black Pride Anthem, “To Be Young, Gift­ed and Black,” on Sesame Street (1972)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

For the indef­i­nite time being, we live with fear atop anx­i­ety, anx­ious­ly look­ing for order in the past and in the future. But some peo­ple with new­found leisure in their coro­n­avirus iso­la­tion have returned to what mat­ters to them most here and now, and start­ed to imag­ine a world no pol­i­cy pro­pos­al can describe. The inter­net has giv­en us greater and greater access to peo­ple who have been doing this all along. Even before the cur­rent pan­dem­ic, artists like Her­bie Han­cock and Kamasi Wash­ing­ton were expand­ing our notions of the pos­si­ble in music and in life.

After leav­ing Miles Davis and going solo, Han­cock was some­times unfair­ly derid­ed as a pop­u­lar­iz­er. In 1974, after his first gold record Head Hunters came out, crit­ic Lee Under­wood gave him the back­hand­ed nick­name “Mr. Com­mu­ni­cate-With-A-Wider-Audi­ence.” But as an ear­ly adopter of syn­the­siz­er tech­nol­o­gy, he was instru­men­tal in keep­ing jazz in the spot­light through­out the 70s and inte­gral to its influ­ence on 80s pop. Like­wise, Wash­ing­ton has been on the van­guard of a resur­gent jazz as con­ver­sant with hip hop as it is with its fore­bears.

Part of a “bilin­gual gen­er­a­tion,” as John Lewis writes at The Guardian, flu­ent in the old and new, Wash­ing­ton built cul­tur­al bridges as the musi­cal direc­tor for Kendrick Lamar’s ground­break­ing To Pimp a But­ter­fly. And both Han­cock and Wash­ing­ton have worked with pro­duc­er Fly­ing Lotus, the grand-nephew of Alice Coltrane and grand­son of singer-song­writer Mar­i­lyn McLeod. In their col­lab­o­ra­tions with oth­er artists and their career-span­ning world tours, they know their sub­ject inti­mate­ly when they talk about music as a unit­ing force, a fact we’ve all remarked on as peo­ple in infect­ed areas emerge from win­dows to ser­e­nade their neigh­bors.

Maybe music is even more pow­er­ful than we allow in our com­mu­nal­ly joy­ful appre­ci­a­tion of Ital­ian opera singers on bal­conies. Not only does it unite gen­er­a­tions and gen­res, as Wash­ing­ton says in his short, ani­mat­ed con­ver­sa­tion with Han­cock above, it shuts down big­otry. When racists hear James Brown, he jokes, they become tem­porar­i­ly embar­rassed out of their hate. (“I’ll go back to being a big­ot when the song is over.”) Han­cock replies that “music has a job to do,” and it’s to keep peo­ple togeth­er. How does it do this? Not only through mutu­al appre­ci­a­tion but also mutu­al cre­ation.

“Music, and the arts in gen­er­al,” says Han­cock, can com­bine cul­tures, reli­gions, and oth­er dif­fer­ences unique­ly such that “what comes out is some­thing that nei­ther one can take cred­it for. What comes out is a third thing. So it’s like one plus one equals three. That’s a new kind of math,” he says, and laughs. Han­cock and Wash­ing­ton both draw from sources of spir­i­tu­al wis­dom that inform their music and broad­er views. Hancock’s Bud­dhist prac­tice con­sti­tutes for him, he said in his Har­vard Nor­ton Lec­tures in 2014, a way of “being open to the myr­i­ad oppor­tu­ni­ties that are avail­able on the oth­er side of the fortress.”

Wash­ing­ton, whom The Fad­er hyper­bol­i­cal­ly calls “the wis­est man on earth,” casu­al­ly shared his phi­los­o­phy of pos­si­bil­i­ty in a recent inter­view. Tran­scend­ing prej­u­dice requires more than dig­ging James Brown togeth­er. Maybe we need to read­just our whole per­spec­tive, he sug­gests:

I’m kind of a sci­ence-fic­tion guy and was think­ing, “One day we’re going to trav­el to all these places and see the uni­verse.” So there’s a side of myself that’s real­ly infat­u­at­ed with all the amaz­ing things that I will do and the world can do — the idea of our end­less poten­tial. And the oth­er side sees the strug­gle and is always prob­lem-solv­ing and pok­ing holes, because I think of myself as being able to plug those holes. I imag­ine the world as a place of nev­er-end­ing strug­gle because I have end­less poten­tial.

It’s a quote that calls to mind the Bodhisattva’s vows. And what do we do? we might demand of this vision­ary vague­ness. What do we do with the spec­ta­cles of gross neg­li­gence, cor­rup­tion, and crim­i­nal mis­man­age­ment all around us? His answer involves accep­tance as much as action.

We don’t live in the whole world so we have a whole lot of con­trol — ulti­mate con­trol — over our lit­tle pock­et. The peo­ple who seem to have a lot of pow­er don’t actu­al­ly have a lot of pow­er; some­one like Trump only has the pow­er peo­ple give him and at any point we can take that back.

We might imag­ine the larg­er con­ver­sa­tion between Han­cock and Wash­ing­ton, who began a tour togeth­er last year, elab­o­rat­ing on ways to act local­ly but think with lim­it­less poten­tial, to emerge from fortress­es of prej­u­dice and exer­cise col­lec­tive pow­er. We would do well to pay atten­tion to artists now, espe­cial­ly those like Han­cock and Wash­ing­ton who have been sound­track­ing the future for decades, and who seem to think that it still has a chance.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Her­bie Han­cock Presents the Pres­ti­gious Nor­ton Lec­tures at Har­vard Uni­ver­si­ty: Watch Online

John Coltrane Talks About the Sacred Mean­ing of Music in the Human Expe­ri­ence: Lis­ten to One of His Final Inter­views (1966)

The His­to­ry of Spir­i­tu­al Jazz: Hear a Tran­scen­dent 12-Hour Mix Fea­tur­ing John Coltrane, Sun Ra, Her­bie Han­cock & More

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

If Sis­ter Roset­ta Tharpe was the God­moth­er of Rock and Roll, then Lit­tle Richard, who passed away Sat­ur­day at the age of 87 from bone can­cer, deserves to be its God­fa­ther. This is no emp­ty hon­orif­ic, despite the fact that Tharpe was already tour­ing the coun­try as a teenage gospel prodi­gy in 1932 when Richard Pen­ni­man was born in Macon Geor­gia, and “oth­er musi­cians,” includ­ing Chuck Berry, Fats Domi­no, Bo Did­dley, and Elvis Pres­ley, “had already been min­ing a sim­i­lar vein by the time [Lit­tle Richard] record­ed his first hit, ‘Tut­ti Frutti’—a rau­cous song about sex, its lyrics cleaned up but its mean­ing hard to miss,” writes Tim Wein­er in a New York Times obit­u­ary.

Lit­tle Richard “raised the ener­gy lev­el sev­er­al notch­es and cre­at­ed some­thing not quite like any music that had been heard before—something new, thrilling and more than a lit­tle dan­ger­ous.” Tak­ing his lessons from Tharpe, he brought the dynamism of the gospel he was raised to sing and the pro­fane rhythms of the blues into a high-volt­age syn­the­sis. Lit­tle Richard’s rep­u­ta­tion needs no bur­nish­ing. He has nev­er been neglect­ed by his­to­ri­ans of rock and roll. Nonethe­less, it is star­tling to rec­og­nize, as gui­tar great Ver­non Reid wrote in a Twit­ter trib­ute: “No Jimi, No Bea­t­les No Bowie, No Bolan. NO GLAM, No Fred­die, No Prince, No Elton, No Pre­ston No Sly, No Ste­vie, WITHOUT Lit­tle Richard!”

Lit­tle Richard’s life sto­ry mir­rors his ear­ly hero Roset­ta Tharpe’s in sev­er­al sig­nif­i­cant ways. Not only were they two of the most wide­ly influ­en­tial stars to emerge from the black church and onto sec­u­lar stages, but they were also the music’s first stars to live open­ly gay lives, for a time, before suc­cumb­ing to church and social pres­sures and return­ing to the clos­et. For Tharpe, that meant end­ing a long rela­tion­ship with her roman­tic and tour­ing part­ner Marie Knight and agree­ing “to par­tic­i­pate in a spec­ta­cle of a wed­ding endorsed and encour­aged by the record label for prof­it,” writes Lyn­nee Denise, “in front a pay­ing crowd of 25,000 pay­ing guests.”

Lit­tle Richard famous­ly walked away from his explo­sive career in 1957 to mar­ry, adopt a son, and become a mis­sion­ary. The mar­riage, and re-con­ver­sion, didn’t last. After four years, he was divorced fol­low­ing an arrest for “approach­ing men in a restroom,” notes France 24. “Richard—resentful that rock ‘n’ roll was tak­ing off with­out him—soon returned to music with a tri­umphant tour of Eng­land.” (See him in a fierce per­for­mance in France above from 1966.) Then he went back to the church and nev­er left. “By the late 1980s he had man­aged to merge his reli­gious life and his stage per­sona, tour­ing as a preach­er and offi­ci­at­ing at flashy celebri­ty wed­dings.”

He became some­thing of a car­i­ca­ture of him­self in lat­er years, appear­ing as a high-camp fig­ure in TV and film. Through­out his life, Richard iden­ti­fied open­ly as gay or bisex­u­al, recount­ing sto­ries of orgies and telling Pent­house in 1995, “I’ve been gay my whole life.” He also preached against LGTBTQ peo­ple, call­ing same-sex attrac­tion “unnat­ur­al.” The L.A. Times’ Richard Cromelin under­states the case in writ­ing, “he var­i­ous­ly mod­i­fied his sto­ry and renounced and/or denied his homo­sex­u­al­i­ty.” Depend­ing on how one saw it, he was either divine­ly “healed” of his life­long sex­u­al ori­en­ta­tion, or he was trag­i­cal­ly beset by ingrained reli­gious self-hatred.

Maybe none of this should mat­ter much in assess­ing Lit­tle Richard’s musi­cal lega­cy, except for the fact that his sud­den appear­ance as a gay artist in the “then-macho world of rock,” as France 24 puts it, changed that world irrev­o­ca­bly. Lit­tle Richard’s flam­boy­ance and teas­ing ambiva­lence became a hall­mark of pop cul­ture; his per­sona informed the stage career of near­ly every queer and sex­u­al­ly ambigu­ous super­star to fol­low. As a “sex­u­al­ly flu­id black man com­ing from the US south,” he gave black artists per­mis­sion to exper­i­ment with iden­ti­ty and defy rigid stereo­types imposed by a lega­cy of slav­ery. There’s also no get­ting around the fact that “Tut­ti Frut­ti,” the song that “intox­i­cat­ed legions of teenage fans eager to break loose from but­toned-up mid-cen­tu­ry Amer­i­ca,” was orig­i­nal­ly a song about anal sex. You can read those excised lyrics at Bill­board. They involve the phras­es “good booty” and “grease it.”

Like one of his most tal­ent­ed of his many off­spring, Prince, Lit­tle Richard some­how found a life­long home in a reli­gion that reject­ed his sex­u­al desire. This has been dif­fi­cult for many of his fans to under­stand. Per­haps he was enact­ing this com­pli­cat­ed, lib­er­at­ing, like­ly tor­tu­ous strug­gle to rec­on­cile the irrec­on­cil­able while onstage scream­ing bloody mur­der and gen­er­al­ly tear­ing the roof off the place. In what­ev­er way Lit­tle Richard ulti­mate­ly came to terms with his pres­ence in music he claimed to have invent­ed (despite Sis­ter Roset­ta), and yet also called “demon­ic,” it’s unde­ni­able that the past six­ty years or so of pop cul­ture would nev­er have hap­pened with­out him.

Relat­ed Con­tent:  

The Woman Who Invent­ed Rock n’ Roll: An Intro­duc­tion to Sis­ter Roset­ta Tharpe

New Web Project Immor­tal­izes the Over­looked Women Who Helped Cre­ate Rock and Roll in the 1950s

Chuck Berry Takes Kei­th Richards to School, Shows Him How to Rock (1987)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness