Obama Barack - Obama music: some notes from a south sider abroad

Legend Press Ltd, 3rd Floor, Unicorn House,
221-222 Shoreditch High Street, London E1 6PJ
info@legend-paperbooks.co.uk
www.legendpress.co.uk

Contents Bonnie Greer

The right of the above author to be identified as the author of
this work has be asserted in accordance with the
Copyright, Designs and Patent Act 1988.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data available.

ISBN 978-1-907461-06-4

Set in Times

Printed by JF Print Ltd., Sparkford.

Cover designed by Keira Rathbone
www.keirarathbone.com

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be
reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form, or by any means electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the
publisher. Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation
to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution
and civil claims for damages.

To my deeply missed late father, my uncles, my
brothers, my brothers-in-law, my male cousins
and nephews and great nephews, to my husband,
and to all those men who have been and still are
brothers and fathers, friends, and other good and
kind things to meand to the old brother with the
cane on Michigan Avenue, Chicago, who told me
to go ahead and do my book.

Table of Contents

American Sermons: The Pilgrims to Martin Luther King Jr. Michael Warner Books.

The Audacity Of Hope, Barack Obama, Crown Publishers, New York, 2006
Dreams From My Father, Barack Obama, Canongate, 2007
Renegade The Making Of the President, Richard Wolffe, Crown Publishers, New York, 2009
Obama: From Promise To Power, David Mendell, Amistad/Harper Collins 2008
Michelle A Biography, Liza Mundy-Pocket, Star Books/Simon Schuster, 2008
Michelle Obama First Lady Of Hope, Elizabeth Lightfoot, The Lyons Press/The Globe Pequot Press, 2008
Considering Genius, Stanley Crouch, Basic Civitas Books/ Perseus, 2006

I was born and raised on the South Side. It has a particular musical landscape and history that helps to fill in part of the picture that is the 44th President of the United States.

To understand, at a deeper level, the phenomenon that is Barack Obama, it is necessary to know something about the community that he made his base, where his wife and children were born and raised, where he began his career and where his private home is located: the South Side of Chicago.

Obama Music is a mixture of tales of my own life growing up on the South Side, mixed in with stories and observations about Obama, linking all of this in with the music, the musicians and the music scene, beginning in the past and moving forward. Obama writes in The Audacity Of Hope: Ive always felt a curious relationship to the sixties. Im a pure product of that era

And so am I.

Now, Obama Music is made up of all kinds of music: hip hop; country, classical, rock and roll, all of which were heard on Inauguration Day.

But it is also the blues, gospel, soul and jazz, especially from the golden eras; when the people of the South Side began to build the great institutions, and the great solidarity, that enabled Barack Obama to become the most powerful person on the planet.

Living away from the place you were born, living abroad, sometimes means that you get the details badly wrong.

I wrote in The Guardian at the beginning of Obamas Presidential campaign:

The truth is that I just cant warm to Obama.

Maybe Im just too working-class, too old-school, to trust black people who look that slick, outside of show business or the church. Maybe I distrust someone who allows others to compare him to JFK or even MLK. I was around when they were alive. Hes not them.

This book will show you how I moved from there, to this point in The Telegraph at the end of his campaign:

In his triumphant election campaign of 1984, Ronald Reagan declared: Its morning in America. If that is the case, then the election of Barack Obama as the 44th President of the United States, and the first African-American to hold that awesome office, represents high noon, the moment at which the light is at its brightest and strongest. America has stepped away from its robust, too often reckless and romantic youth into maturity.

But living abroad, being an expat, can make you so out of it that you have a kind of analogue edge.

Sometimes you can see bigger shapes, deeper patterns.

You use old-fashioned, maybe even incorrect words and ways of looking at things because they better describe how you feel, what you mean.

I use the word the word black in this book instead of Black or African American because for me black speaks of triumph and perseverance, it links me to my rural ancestors and to the South Side and the time that I grew up in.

It is the word that Barack Obama uses most often to describe himself.

I can see from my vantage point across the ocean that being born black in America at the beginning of 1964, having intelligence and energy, the support and encouragement of a loving, supportive, and hard working family was a very lucky thing.

This is because 1964 was arguably the most important date in black American history since the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863.

Michelle Obama was born in January, 1964 and these are just a few of the things that happened during her first year of life: when she was two months old, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King met for the first and last time, signalling a major shift in the Civil Rights Movement; when she was six months old, President Lyndon Baines Johnson signed the 1964 Civil Rights Act effectively beginning the process of ending segregation and ushering in other measures like Affirmative Action, paving the way for bright black kids to attend elite universities.

1964 was the year that Nelson Mandela made his defiant speech before being sentenced to prison, sending the antiapartheid movement to another level.

A month before Michelles first birthday, Martin Luther King was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

Oh, and 1964 was the year that Dionne Warwick had one of her greatest hits: Youll Never Get To Heaven If You Break My Heart. A big breakthrough for her.

It becomes clearer and clearer to me as time passes that jazz and soul are hybrids. They are the complex, urbanized offshoots of blues and even gospel. And because they are hybrids they are open systems able to influence easily other kinds of music while they themselves are open to change.

From my perspective, jazz and soul are also responses to electrification and the experience of the city. Their open systems make them fluid, malleable, forever mutating into genres and portals such as hip-hop.

This is a South Side Presidency.

It is about the music of that train that brought my people up from the South to the South Side. They brought with them their blues, their gospel, soul and jazz. They deepened these musics, thereby changing not only themselves but the city and the nation and the world.

They are reflected in a poem, copied down by Zora Neale Hurston, the great Harlem Renaissance writer, from a sermon she heard at the end of the 20s.

I heard the whistle of the damnation train
Dat pulled out from the Garden of Eden loaded wid cargo
goin' to hell
Ran at break-neck speed all de way thru de law
All de way thru de prophetic age
All de way thru de reign of kings and judges
Plowed her way thru de Jordan
And on her way to Calvary when she blew for de switch