THE AFRICAN SPIRIT AND BLACK ARTISTS
Despite being reared by the chain and the lash, there were a handful of Blacks who were able to develop their artistic craft simply because they were incapable of being rendered in deaf and dumb to the incessant calling of their muse. Institutions such as the church, allowed a large number of Blacks the sanctioned opportunity to become great performers, singers, musicians, dancers, orators and craftsmen. And so from this beginning, the legacy of African in America as artisan flourished.
It could be argued that throughout the Black man's 400 year struggle for dignity and equality, Black artist have served the most indispensible role in the recognition, development and enhancement of Negritude. Black pride, Black hope as well as countless impossible dreams have been nurtured and steeled by the hope and inspiration given by Black artists. Their creations often times served as the only available balm for torn, burned and bloody skin, the only cast for broken bones and minds and the only counsel for raped and dehumanized bodies. The Woozy pays homage to these great artists and the lessons their art has taught to the world about the beauty of the African in America.
Bob Marley
In the year 1944, Captain Norval Marley married a young Jamaican girl named Cedalla Booker. On February 6, 1945 at two thirty in the morning their son, Robert Nesta Marley was born in his grandfather's house. Soon after Bob was born his father left his mother. He did however give financial support and occasionally returned to see his son. It was now the late fifties, jobs were scarce in Jamaica, Cedella and Bob moved to Trenchtown. In Trenchtown Bob spent a lot of his time with his good friend Bunny. Also in the big city Bob was more exposed to the music which he had loved, including such greats as Fats Domino and Ray Charles. Bob and Bunny attended a music class together which was held by the famous Jamaican singer Joe Higgs. In that class they met Peter Macintosh and soon became good friends. When Bob was 16, he started to follow his dream of becoming a musician. Bob's musical talents shone much more brightly then anyone else and found himself in the studio recording his first single "Judge Not". There were many trials and tribulations before The Wailers were formed making their own versions of motown do-wop bands before returning to their roots and articulating a new sound, Reggae. through many seminal albums, "Rastaman Vibration", "Babylon by Bus" and "Live" In the early 80's the band was planning an American tour with Stevie Wonder for that winter. Bob's health was deteriorating, but he still got clearance from a doctor to go on the road. The tour started with Boston, followed by New York. During the New York show Bob's looked very sick and he almost fainted. The next morning on Sept. 21 while jogging through Central Park, Bob collapsed and was brought to the hospital. There a brain tumour was discovered and doctors gave him a month to live. Rita Marley wanted the tour cancelled but Bob wanted to continue on. He played an unforgettable show in Pittsburgh but was too ill to continue so the tour was finally cancelled. He died on May 11, 1981 in a Miami hospital. .
Marvin Gaye
Born Marvin Gay, Marvin started out signing in the church, and then went to Detroit as a session drummer for Motown and later learned his doo-wop and the art of multiple voiced harmonies, through singing as a member of Harvey Fuqua's group. Thoughtful, deep, tender, sensitive and yet forceful, Marvin is one of those rare artists, who continued to develop and grow and to drop bomb after bomb on the music community, I heard it through the grapevine, Mercy, Mercy Me, Let's Get It On, Here My Dear, The Star Spangled Banner at the basketball all-star game, and Sexual Healing Marvin served as a lover, a friend, a confidante, a father figure and a sage to several generations of American's.
Richard Pryor
Born in Ohio, the son of a whore, raised in a whorehouse by his grandmother, who was the Madame, Richard Pryor, a shy and painfully sensitive child learned early on, that if you kept them laughing, they usually didn't beat your ass. Made a star through a shameless impersonation of Bill Cosby, The combination of cocaine, growing Black concsiouness and the shrugging off of his demons, eventually lead to the creation of a new comic and a new form of socially true storytelling/comedy. Richard Pryor spoke about things that only hood rats and ghetto-ites knew first hand, yet through his voice, he gave life to the Junkie, the Whore, the Pimp, the Drug Dealer as well as the sexually confused adolescent, who was always himself. Richard had the unique gift for turning a phrase in such a way, that he could be talking about martian's landing on Mr. Gilmore's property, and yet, he was also talking about the ironies and absurdity of every aspect of the Black man's experience in the United States. He became hugely famous, long after he had produced his best work, That's Nigger's Crazy, Is it Something I Said? and Bicentennial Nigger, were all classics, any one of which could be named the comedy album of the millenium.
Jean-Michel Basquiat
From Haitian parents, born of a mother with a chronic schizophrenia, young Jean-Michel displayed artistic talent from the time he was able to hold a writing instrument. His development progressed outside of the bounds of what developmental specialist had previously held as "stages" of conception and drawing ability. At once, Jean would draw something he had seen, starting on one spot of the page and working out details methodically until he had finished the entire form. From this beginning, troubled and living in another world, Jean-Michel began a host of artistic indulgences, from music, to film, to disc jockey to graffiti artist. SAMO as he was known, soon caught fire and quickly went from gutter obscurity, to international one man shows, arm and arm with Andy Warhol, and receiving six figure commissions. His work showed primitism, immediacy, absurdity and a confidence and command of perspective unparalleled. His work also bore the trademark minimalist boldness as well as the metaphorical symbology of the African mind. Dying all too soon, another victim of the burnt, bent spoon, Jean-Michel's legend continues to grow and his work continues to be pondered over and marveled at.
James Earl Jones
James Earl Jones was born in Arkabutla Township, Mississippi. His parents separated before his birth and he was raised by his grandparents on a farm that had been in the family since Reconstruction. When he was only five, the family moved north to a farm in rural Michigan, and the young boy found the adaptation so traumatic that he developed an incapacitating stutter. For years he refused to speak more than a few words at a time until one day he repeated a poem in class. with his own verses committed to memory, Jones found he could speak without stuttering. Jones went on to compete in high-school debates and oratorical contests. He won a scholarship to the University of Michigan. After completing service as an Army Ranger, he set off for New York City to pursue acting studies. In 1968 Jones earned widespread acclaim for his performance in The Great White Hope playing a character based on Jack Johnson. He has worked in over 50 films. A master of the stage and screen, he infused his performances with the burning damage and injury matched only by the writing of James Baldwin in the movies Dr. Strangelove, The Great White Hope, The UFO Incident, The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars & Motor Kings, and Conan the Barbarian as well as voice-overs for Darth Vader in Star Wars and Mufasa in the Lion King Jones showed a completeness of character and a cutting edge prescience of tragedy, that commanded your attention anytime he was on the screen.
Fela Kuti
Singer-composer, bandleader, trumpet, saxophone, keyboard player, and politician. Kuti is one of Africa's most revered names. He began as a highlife singer in 1954 and during this period developed his own unusual sound which he described as highlife-jazz. In 1968 Kuti announced the arrival of Afro-beat, and within the year was taling his music on a 10-month tour of America where he became influenced by the new jazz movement at the time. On returning to Nigeria he opened a nightclub, the Shrine, and changed the name of his band to Africa 70. His outspoken views and fight for the rights of the common man and woman made him unpopular with the government but a hero to the people and when in 1979 the people returned to power in the country Kuti began his own political party - MOP (Movement of the People). As his conflict grew with the government, he eventually became a candidate for President of Nigeria. His travels around the world brought him to the heart of the civil rights movement and an enduring affiliation and friendship with several Black activist and Black Panther's. Kuti was heavily influenced by contemporary Black bands, and he also had a huge influence on Black American artists such as Roy Ayers, Grover Washington, Jr., Quincy Jones and Herbie Hancock, who at the time were looking to re-Africanize their music. Kuti played music as if it were a soundtrack to life. He also was a political nightmare to the rich and politically connected Blacks left in charge of the banks and pursestrings of Nigeria in the wake of de-colonization. Despite beatings, threats to his life and harrasment, Fela Kuti, refused to stop speaking his mind when he criticized the Black leaderhship for emulating the Whites, wearing suits, looting the country and providing no services to the people. His travels around the world brought him to the heart of the civil rights movement and an enduring affiliation and friendship with the Black Panther's, yet, by 1983 when Kuti returned to Nigeria, he was sentenced to five years imprisonment on a spurious currency smuggling charge. Fela Anikulapo Kuti, musician and political rebel, died of an Aids-related illness at his home in Nigeria on August 2 1997 at the age of 58.
Miles Davis
Miles was born in Alton, Illinois on May 26, 1926. He grew up in East St. Louis in a middle class family, playing in his high school band as well as with several local R&B groups. He quickly became enamored of jazz, particularly the new sounds being created by Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. Davis' father sent him to Juliard to study music, but Miles didn't spend much time there, dropping out to play with Parker's quintet from 1946 to 1948. That proved to be a humbling experience at first, since Miles didn't yethave the chops to keep up with Parker's breakneck tempos and chord substitutions. He learned quickly, though, and grew immensely as a musician during his tenure with Bird.
The early 50s were an erratic time for Davis, mostly due to his heroin addiction, and he was a disappointing performer during this time. By the middle of the decade, however, he had cleaned up and formed his first quintet, comprised of Davis, John Coltrane, Red Garland, Paul Chambers, and Philly Joe Jones. This group became very popular and recorded several essential albums for the Prestige label: Cookin', Steamin', Workin', and Relaxin'. When the quintet broke up, Davis spent time collaborating again with arranger Gil Evans, resulting in great albums like Porgy and Bess and Sketches of Spain. He finished the decade out by recording one of the best known jazz albums of all time, Kind of Blue, with a sextet that included Coltrane, Julian "Cannonball" Adderley, Bill Evans, Paul Chambers, and Philly Joe Jones.
Miles died on September 28, 1991, but his music, style, and collaborators all continue to influence not only jazz music, but popular culture as well.
Henry Ossawa Tanner
America's first internationally renowned African-American artist, Henry Ossawa Tanner was born in Pittsburgh to a well-educated and devoutly religious family. When Henry was age 13, his father, the Reverend Benjamin Tucker Tanner, moved the family to Philadelphia. With the support of his parents and inspiration from the art of the 1876 Philadelphia Exposition, he enrolled in the Pennsylvania Academy to study with Thomas Eakins who became a close friend.
Jacob Lawrence
Born in Atlantic City, Jacob Lawrence spent part of his childhood in Pennsylvania and then, after his parents split up in 1924, he went with his mother and siblings to New York, settling in Harlem. He trained as a painter at the Harlem Art Workshop, inside the New York Public Library's 113 5th Street branch. Younger than the artists and writers who took part in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, nevertheless, he gained self-confidence from the Harlem cultural milieu - in particular, from the art critic Alain Locke, a Harvard-trained esthete (and America's first black Rhodes scholar) who believed strongly in the possibility of an art created by blacks which could speak explicitly to African-Americans and still embody the values, and self-critical powers, of modernism.
From childhood, Lawrence had been steeped in family and community stories of the Migration, and when - encouraged by Locke - he decided to paint it. When he painted a lynching, for instance, he left out the dangling body and the jeering crowd: there is only bare earth, a branch, an empty noose, and the huddled lump of a grieving woman.
Billie Holliday
Billie "Lady Day" Holiday was born in Baltimore in 1915. She endured a hard childhood -- her musician father left the family early, and her mother wasn't able to keep her consistently which resulted in Billie often being put in care or relatives who abused her. She was raped at age 11 and grew up in poverty. In 1929, she moved to New York, where she worked as a maid and then as a teenage prostitute. According to legend, in 1930 (at the age of 15), to keep her mother from being evicted, she sang Body and Soul and reduced the audience to tears. She began singing in bars and restaurants. Unlike her singing, in life, her instincts were far from perfect. She fell in love with men who stole money from her, abused her, and introduced her to heroin. When she got out of prison, she went back to heroin. By the Fifties, the third period, her voice was going her voice was more croaky, and she sometimes missed notes, but her ability to interpret songs was enhanced. Some consider this work, with Verve records, to be some of her finest.
Gertrude Ma Rainey
Gertrude Rainey was born in Columbus, Georgia, on April 26, 1886. She began performing at age 14 with a local revue and, in her late teens, joined the touring Rabbit Foot Minstrels. By all accounts, she was the first woman to incorporate blues into vaudeville, minstrel and tent shows. In fact, it is believed that Rainey coached a young Bessie Smith while touring with the Rabbit Foot Minstrels. After more than a quarter-century as a performer, Rainey was signed to Paramount Records in 1923, at age 38. She recorded over a hundred sides during her six years at Paramount. Her most memorable songs were often about the harsh realities of life in the Deep South for poor blacks, including such classics as "C.C. Rider," "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom" and "Bo Weavil Blues."
When the blues faded from popularity in the Thirties, the earthy Ma Rainey returned home to her Georgia hometown, where she ran two theaters until her death from a heart attack in 1939.
Robert Johnson
Although Robert Johnson never recorded near as much as Lonnie Johnson, Charley Patton, or Blind Lemon Jefferson, he certainly traveled more than all of them put together. After his first recordings came out and "Terraplane Blues" became his signature tune (a so-called "race" record selling over three or four-thousand copies back in the early to mid-'30s was considered a hit), Johnson hit the road, playing anywhere and everywhere he could. Instilled with a seemingly unquenchable desire to experience new places and things, his wandering nature took him up and down the Delta and as far a field as St. Louis, Chicago, and Detroit (where he performed over the radio on the Elder Moten Hour), places Son House and Charley Patton had only seen in the movies, if that. But the end came at a Saturday-night dance at a juke joint in Three Forks, MS, in August of 1938. Playing with Honeyboy Edwards and Sonny Boy Williamson (Rice Miller), Johnson was given a jug of moonshine whiskey laced with either poison or lye, presumably by the husband of a woman the singer had made advances toward. He continued playing into the night until he was too sick to continue, then brought back to a boarding house in Greenwood, some 15 miles away. He lay sick for several days, successfully sweating the poison out of his system, but caught pneumonia as a result and died on August 16th. The legend was just beginning.
Quincy Jones
Quincy Delight Jones, Jr., known to his friends as "Q," was born on Chicago's South Side. When he was ten he moved, with his father and stepmother, to Bremerton, Washington, a suburb of Seattle. He first fell in love with music when he was in elementary school. and tried nearly all the instruments in his school band before settling on the trumpet. While barely in his teens, Quincy befriended a local singer-pianist, only three years his senior. His name was Ray Charles. The two youths formed a combo, eventually landing small club and wedding gigs. At 18, the young trumpeter won a scholarship to Berklee College of Music in Boston, but dropped out abruptly when he received an offer to go on the road with bandleader Lionel Hampton. Quincy Jones turned his attention to another musical area that had long been closed to blacks -- the world of film scores. At the invitation of director Sidney Lumet, he composed the music for The Pawnbroker. It was the first of his 33 major motion picture scores. This extraordinary streak almost came to a sudden end in August 1974, when Jones suffered a near-fatal cerebral aneurysm -- the bursting of blood vessels leading to the brain. After two delicate operations, and six months of recuperation, Quincy Jones was back at work with his dedication renewed. Jones went back into the studio to produce Michael Jackson's first solo album Off the Wall. Eight million copies were sold, making Jackson an international superstar and Quincy Jones the most sought-after record producer in Hollywood. The pair teamed again in 1982 to make Thriller. It became the best selling album of all time, selling over 30 million copies around the globe and spawning an unprecedented six Top Ten singles. The all-time most nominated Grammy artist, with a total of 76 nominations and 26 awards, Quincy Jones has also received an Emmy Award, seven Oscar nominations, and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award.
Sly Stone
born Sylvester Stewart, March 15, 1944, he and his family moved from his home state of Texas to San Francisco in the '50s. He had already begun to express an interest in music, and when he was 16, he had a regional hit with "Long Time Away." Stone studied music composition, theory, and trumpet at Vallejo Junior College in the early '60s. During 1966, Stone formed the Stoners, which featured trumpeter Cynthia Robinson. Though the Stoners didn't last long, he brought Robinson along as one of the core members of his next group, Sly the Family Stone. Formed in early 1967. The Family Stone also featured Fred Stewart, Larry Graham Jr., Greg Errico, Jerry Martini, and Rosie Stone (piano), who all were of different racial backgrounds. The group's eclectic music and multiracial composition made them distinctive from the numerous flower-power bands in San Francisco. "Everyday People," released late in 1968, lead to 1969's Stand Featuring. The Family Stone quickly became known as one of the best live bands of the late '60s, and their performance at -Woodstock was widely hailed as one of the festival's best. While the group was at the height of its popularity, Sly was beginning to unravel behind the scenes. Developing a debilitating addiction to narcotics, Stone soon became notorious for arriving late for concerts, frequently missing the shows all together. Stone's growing personal problems, as well as his dismay with the slow death of the civil rights movement and other political causes, surfaced on There's a Riot Goin' On. Nevertheless, The Family pointed the way to a new psychedelic soul that was inclusive of all races and spoke to the eutopian visions inspired by the hippies and bippies. George Clinton, Funkadelic, Parliament and Jimmy Hendrix, and The Doors, all followed Sly's lead
George Clinton
Born in Kannapolis, NC, on July 22, 1940, Clinton became interested in doo wop while living in New Jersey during the early '50s. He formed the Parliaments in 1955, based out of a barbershop back room where he straightened hair. The group had a small R&B hit during 1967, but Clinton began to mastermind the Parliaments' activities two years later. Recording both as Parliament and Funkadelic, the group revolutionized R&B during the '70s, twisting soul music into funk by adding influences from several late-'60s acid heroes: Jimi Hendrix, Frank Zappa, and Sly Stone. The Parliament/Funkadelic machine ruled black music during the '70s, capturing over 40 R&B hit singles (including three number ones) and recording three platinum albums.