The face of Black music : photographs 9780306707568, 030670756X, 9780306800399, 030680039X

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THERRPOR BLACK MUSIC PHOTOGRAPHS BY — VALERIE WILMER

INTRODUCTION BY ARCHIE SHEPP _

Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2023 with funding from Kahle/Austin Foundation

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Printed in USA

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Dedicated to the memory

of Tadd

Dameron.

Dameron,

New

Duke

York, June 1962

Ellington,

Skip James, Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, Johnny Hodges, Robert Johnson, Sidney Bechet, Albert Ayler, Harry Carney,

Bessie Smith . . . and all the great Black composers whose music IES CYA) oo

THE FACE OF

BLACK MUSIC | PHOTOGRAPHS BY VALERIE WILMER INTRODUCTION BY ARCHIE SHEPP

DA CAPO PRESS - NEW YORK

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Wilmer, Valerie. The face of Black music. 1. Afro-American

musicians—Portraits. ML87.W655

musicians—Portraits.

2. Jazz

1. Title. 780’ .92'2 [B]

76-18115

ISBN 0-306-70756-X

ISBN 0-306-80039-X pbk.

781.51

W688f

Wilmer, The

face

Valerie. of

; photographs

Black

music

/

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint their material: Lyrics from “I’m Your Hoochie Coochie Man” by Willie Dixon. © Copyright 1957, Arc Music Corporation.

Excerpts from Music is My Mistress by Edward Kennedy Ellington. Copyright © 1973 by Duke Ellington, Inc. Reprinted by permission of Doubleday & Company, Inc. Published in England by W. H. Allen & Company. Lyrics from “Born Under a Bad Sign” by Booker T. Jones and William Bell. © 1967 by East/Memphis Music Corporation. All rights reserved. International Copyright secured. Lyrics from “A Change is Gonna Come” by Sam Cooke. © 1964 KAGS Music Corporation Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Excerpts from The World of Duke Ellington by Stanley Dance. 1972 Reprinted by permission of Charles Scribner’s Sons.

First paperback printing—August, 1976 Second paperback printing—January, 1983 Third paperback printing—January, 1989

Copyright © 1976 by Valerie Wilmer

Published by Da Capo Press, Inc. A Subsidiary of Plenum Publishing Corporation 233 Spring Street, New York, N.Y. 10013 All Rights Reserved Manufactured

in the United States of America

S.F. PUBLIC LIBRARY

3 1223 04213 8918

Music is going to break the way. It’s like the waves of the ocean. You can’t just cut out the perfect wave and take it home with you. It’s constantly moving all the time. Jimi Hendrix

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INTRODUCTION &

“Ought not the contraction or enlargement of the environment in which the blues were cradled be the calendar by which the death of the blues can be predicted?” Richard Wright. Paris, 1959. (from Introduction to Paul Oliver’s Meaning of the Blues)

Apart from what the educated

layman might ‘‘assume’”’ about African-American

music, i.e., that it represents an amalgam

of the Spirituals, Worksongs,

Arhoolies,

Hollers

Blues, Ragtime, and finally some of the original chants and burial songs brought over from Africa, the day-to-day lives of the people who actually created that music are still a mystery to us, perhaps an enigma in the true Western sense. Even some of the socio-anthropologists—Herskovits, Jahn and Ramos—have been content to bury the importance of the African’s divine inspiration and cultural genius as it manifested itself in the New World under such esoterica and technically misleading terminology

as: ‘‘retention,”

‘‘re-interpretation,”

todd

‘‘cultural-focus,’’

y

and “syncretism,”

to

name a few. This has served on the one hand to obscure the true role played by the earliest African pioneers as they sought, at times, both desperately and resourcefully, to preserve their indigenous cultural heritage, and on the other to confuse and mystify the serious student, for whom the great thematic drama of African religious sensibility vis-a-vis Western scholasticism and rationalism, has been reduced to a hodgepodge of metaphysical compromises. The volume of photographs presented here for the first time seems to me particularly relevant and timely. For though it does not purport to be an exegesis, it does have historical and documentary significance. Ms. Wilmer’s unfailing eye takes us unobtrusively between the backwoods of Mississippi replete with ‘‘sukey-jumps,’’ up through New Orleans, east to the Carolinas and the lofts of New York with its avant-garde “Jazz,”

then out to Chicago’s Flea Market where the blues still hold forth, undaunted by a murderous itinerary. For this migration northward has been the pattern for the rural Black in the United States. Racial strife and intransigent discrimination have kept the Black people on the move. Small wonder that the Black artist should “marvel,” as did the poet Countee Cullen, that God should ‘‘make a poet Black and/bid him sing.”

,

forged Yet out of the squalor of their actual lives, the Blackfolk of the United States have Opscives Wright Richard as is, that one a poetry, a language of irony and metaphor, “terser than basic English, shorn of all hyperbole . . . .” This sinewy quality was carried over to the instrumental music, the horns having become the counterpart of the voice itself. Those of you who have heard the recording of Duke Ellington accompanying Louis Armstrong on the vocal of Azalea will immediately know what I mean about the proximity between horn and voice as they apply to Black music. The riffs used in ‘Jazz,’ too, were a natural outgrowth

of the call-and-response

chant,

the antiphonal hymns. Some occasional songs and children’s games songs even employed the use of breaks, the kind later developed to virtuosic proportions by, among others, Messrs. Armstrong, Morton, Ellington, and Basie. In fact, the Georgia Sea Island singers do a courting song which contains a break that makes one almost anticipate a Lester Young solo.

But anonymity was the name of the game. And one has to search far and wide throughout the United States to find its real soul. The John Henry Fortescues (alias “Guitar Shorty”), and Willie Johnsons,

the James Blacks and Lester Andersons—even

the

Milford Graves and Rashied Alis, though they haunt the lofts of the teeming city— aren’t that easy to find. Hidden behind a wall of indifference or in some lonely shack along a singularly deserted road are the Blackfolk of America. Unsung they sing. Or they play a musical instrument. Despite the permanent trauma of poverty and an almost ubiquitous sadness, there is gaeity; the laughter of the free human heart, implaccably defiant in the face of slavery. The Black man dances. The Black woman dances. Their children dance. Whites puzzle at this and imagine it is simply because they are happy. But if it is “happiness,”” the term can only be rendered in the religiously ecstatic sense of ‘Divine’ as conceived in the Western African spirit. This oneness of the Spirit is aptly displayed by the title of the gospel song Happy Am ! made popular by the Elder Lightfoot, and often quoted by saxophonist Charlie Parker in his blues renditions. It is a happiness which transcends mere laughter. It is a Yoruba happiness, a total affirmation. “You can’t go back with music, you got to go straight ahead,’”’ percussionist Billy Higgins tells us. And it is precisely that ‘existential’ quality that is most readily identifiable in African-American music. ‘Like the waves of the ocean,” Jimi Hendrix's metaphor identifies the innately dialectical processes which determine the destruction of old myths—and

the resurrection of new ones. Thus Hendrix, Chuck

Sonny Til , all are the high priests of a new mythic creation. Many in them the alternative to alienation in a world with which they at odds. They, too, are “outsiders,” to use Wright’s term, which sought to identify with the sound of the Black man’s suffering,

Berry, Elmore James,

white youth have found often find themselves is perhaps why they have the blues.

The blues man is still forced to do the proverbial “ninety-day thing’ on the county farm or else he is heir to the hardships and fortuitous circumstances of the migrant laborer. Thus the words to his song are the “real McCoy.” His song becomes a kind of Everyman’s lament. The blues poet is the community itself in metaphor as British author Ben Sidran has cogently pointed out in his work “Black Talk.” He is the “djilli-kai,”” the “griot’’ (praise singer) transplanted who recounts the mishaps of forgotten days and broken dreams, the Nigger with his devil song telling it like it is.

4

Who would think of the great folk singer Huddie Ledbetter other than as a convict were it not for his white benefactor Mr. Lomax? Mr. Ledbetter contributed more perhaps to the archive of American folk music than any other composer in the United States (Ives and Copeland notwithstanding), yet few people know his name, though he is credited with having preserved, and composed, hundreds of songs, among them Goodnight Irene and Bring a Little Water, Silvy, a hauntingly beautiful work song.

Thus | am hopeful that the honesty in the faces and the scenes which Ms. Wilmer portrays for us will help to dispel some untruths and to some extent lay bare the realities of American rural and industrial life, as it is reflected in the lives of the people who create music in these domains. Appropriately, Ms. Wilmer begins her collection with a study of the two monoliths in contemporary Black music: Louis Armstrong and Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington. This is, of course, as it should be, both by dint of historical

effect that each of these two men

fact and the overwhelming

had on the entire world of musical ideas.

| found the photographs of Mr. Hodges (dubbed the ‘Rabbit’ by his peers), and Mr. Carney which | had never seen before, unique. | remember | had the privilege to meet both men for the first time after a performance at the Salle Pleyel in Paris; it was an experience which will always remain with me. And the serenity of Ornette Coleman’s loft is captured with uncanny accuracy right down to the last detail of the perennial Rheingold beer can. | spent years on New York's Lower East Side and looking at some of these photographs gave me the feeling of old rooms, redolent of shimmering musical sound. The portrait study of saxophonist Leroy Cooper, who is the ‘straw boss’’ with the Ray Charles organization, tells us better than a ‘thousand words” what life on the road is like, even with a topnotch band. As Cooper himself says: ‘‘Guys that haven’t made it in town always wonder what's out on the road ... and then on the other hand, we be saying, ‘Man, I’d love to be home where | could just be with the family and enjoy myself’.”” This statement should squash the carefully nurtured myth about the Boys in the Band. Life on the road, as Cooper observes, can be a kind of hell. Consistently lonely, often traveling under conditions which would make the average man yearn for the fireside and the hearth, he perseveres for better or for worse. It is a way of life he has chosen. And

he wouldn’t turn back now, even

if he could.

Musicians often use the quaint phrase, “Paying dues to play the blues.” And perhaps that best sums it up: hopping freights, ninety days on the county farm, all the vicissitudes incumbent on life in a profession whose greatest reward is most likely itself. No mean thing, I’m certain any acolyte who has received the call would agree. Still, it is devoutly to be wished that the lives of these people could be made more comfortable, more

secure.

The notion persists, unfortunately, that there is some intrinsic relationship between suffering and the blues, thereby using the artifact as a means of legitimizing our we have fantasy stereotypes of what the Black experience is really all about. Indeed if on, observati Wright's answer must we considered the matter at all. Still at some point he when us before hopefully in the affirmative. Albert King lays the gauntlet squarely

says, if it wasn’t for bad luck he wouldn’t have no luck at all. And James Thomas tells us poignantly that if most people are like him, they’ve had nothing but bad luck. Here is perhaps the most unyielding of truths, without the least justification.

Ms. Wilmer has chosen for herself a task of great dimension and handled it sensitively and well. As she herself pointed out in private conversation, whites, no matter where they come from, are not wont to see Black phenomena, perhaps because it turns up in the places where they are not likely to find it—that confounding triptych of the convict, migrant, the rambler, steel driver, the ditch digger, the roustabout, the pimp, the

prostitute, the urban or rural illiterate ‘‘outsider.””

It is the outsider’s view which Mr. Wright used to describe Paul Oliver which | think is also deserving upon Ms. Wilmer, for her work tells equally that she has, in the vernacular, “‘paid her dues.”’

Archie Shepp Amherst,

Mass.

AUTHOR'S INTRODUCTION As a photographer | have turned my camera which | constantly return. My preoccupation it stems from a close personal involvement on essential rightness that goes back to the period

to many subjects, yet there is one to with Black music and the people who make all levels and a conviction about its before | was a teenager.

While recognizing the obvious differences between the many forms African-American music has taken in the twentieth century, there is a unique quality shared equally by Duke Ellington and Smokey Robinson, Mahalia Jackson and Charlie Parker, Fred McDowell and Cecil Taylor, that has kept my camera actively pointing towards the musicians backstage and front-of-house, on band buses and in stuffy, smoke-filled dressing rooms, as surely as my ears have stayed open to the newest (and oldest) developments in the music. Archie Shepp, a fine saxophonist and inheritor of the mantle of not only the late John Coltrane as well as his predecessors—Ben Webster, Paul Gonsalves and Don Byas— articulated my feelings also in an article he wrote about his experiences at the 1967 Pan-African Festival that took place in Algiers: ‘‘Ululation—a thousand Maria Callas’ could not touch the plaintive cry of the Tuareg women who beat the water drum.’” For me, Ornette Coleman has only to play a handful of notes on the saxophone, Aretha Franklin to stand up and do it, and an entire Beethoven symphony is wiped away. | asked Archie Shepp to write the Introduction not merely because he has a ‘‘name”’ in the field but because, through a series of conversations over the years, he has helped to clarify some of my attitudes towards the music. More than anyone else involved with the idea of cultural nationalism, he made me aware of the line linking the practicioners/ exponents of Black or African-American music in its diverse forms, regardless of area or era. His own father was a banjo-playing ditch-digger from Florida; Shepp himself a university graduate, playwright, actor, and teacher who grew up in Philadelphia, yet in their family relationship the line continues. “Like the waves of the ocean’ was how Jimi Hendrix saw the on-going tradition, and the section bearing that title is intended to illustrate the continuum link between musicians from every era. It is, in fact, my intention for the photographs to be viewed as links in a continuing saga that does not stop at the Greyhound Bus Station in Memphis nor finish on stage at Lincoln Center, the Apollo

Theater, or Carnegie Hall.

Making several trips to the South to trace the roots of the music for my personal satisfaction as well as recording them photographically, | found myself inextricably caught up in a tradition as | followed that line. Take a man like Jacob Stuckey, a tractor driver seen here dancing the night away to the sound of Jack Owens’s guitar in a clapboard house in the middle of a Mississippi field. His proud stance symbolizes the “triumph of the human spirit” that Shepp talks of the music displaying despite its lowly origins. But there is another factor that makes the inclusion of this man’s picture of interest. It was his uncle, Henry Stuckey, who taught the blues genius, Skip James. In turn, James's influence on Owens is evident from the way he plays. The Reverend Emory Crolger, asking “Can | get a witness?” in his little Baptist church in Atlanta, is the uncle of the respected saxophonist and teacher, Marion Brown. David Porter, co-composer with Isaac Hayes of a string of song-hits, grew up in abject poverty in Tupelo, Mississippi, the heart of blues country. Dionne Warwicke comes from a family of gospel singers and was raised in the church. Whichever way you cut it, the line is never-ending and each individual’s proximity to his/her roots more pronounced than the outsider might imagine. The line stretches onward and upward.

A trumpeter born in the South whose cynicism has been nurtured by the years, once suggested with more than a little sarcasm that had | spent time picking cotton under the blazing sun, | would be in a better position to savour the realities of the Southern Black experience. The inference was plain, but he missed the point of my exploratory journeys. if you are stimulated by the music of an Ornette Coleman, a Miles Davis, or a Ray Charles, it helps to know where they came from. Most people don’t bother with this; they take the music at its face value and use it purely for entertainment. | went South in order to discover for myself. And wherever | have taken my camera, | have tried to capture the life-affirming quality that sets this music apart. According to the Louisiana-born clarinetist and educator, Alvin Battiste, “Way down deep from the depths of sorrow, music came.”

Discussing this statement, James

Black,

a fine New Orleans drummer whose words enliven this text, put the rhetorical question: “But how could they possibly come up with a music that sounded like that? | guess it was there and nothing could stop it. It’s like maybe you can capture the body, but you can’t capture the spirit and the soul. No way.’”” Archie Shepp would agree. He says he has never doubted that Blacks remained free despite slavery and its continuing legacy. And this freedom

of spirit is obvious from the music, be it the blues—in

turn catharsis,

folk-history, oral philosophy, and entertainment; work songs and field hollers that helped relieve the monotony and pain of enforced labor, yet also served as secret communication between slaves forbidden to speak; or newer forms of so-called “jazz” that defy the critics who dismiss them because they fail to sound like their predecessors.

To return to photography, | have usually found the impact of the music so starkly dramatic that the photographer tends to be influenced by this. The visual aspect of a live performance will evoke a similar emotive response to that experienced by the listener, but it has seldom gone any deeper. Perhaps few photographers are interested in showing who the musician is when he/she is not actually involved in creativity or in earning a living.

My concern is with the individual’s inner core rather than the exterior. | hope that as well as capturing the essence of the music, | have managed to explain something about the people, known and unknown, who appear in these pages, as well as letting them speak for themselves. After afl, they do it so eloquently.

Valerie Wilmer London, England

NY

Archie Shepp. New York, 1971

Jazz is a symbol of the triumph of the human spirit, not of its degradation. It is a lily in spite of the swamp. Archie Shepp

giants Roaming searching the mind and flats, they are.

through the jungle, the jungle of “oohs’’ and “ahs,’’ for a more agreeable noise, | live a life of primitivity with of a child and an unquenchable thirst for sharps The more consonant, the more appetizing and delectable Cacophony is hard to swallow.

Living in a cage, | am almost a hermit, but there is a difference. for | have a mistress. Lovers have come

and gone,

but only my mistress stays. She is beautiful and gentle. She waits on me hand and foot. She is a swinger. She has grace. To hear her speak, you can’t believe your ears. She is ten thousand years old. She is as modern

as tomorrow,

a brand-new

woman

every day, and as endless as time mathematics. Living with her is a labyrinth of ramifications. | look forward to her every gesture.

Music is my mistress, and she plays second fiddle to no one. Duke Ellington

Duke

Ellington.

Royal Albert

My favorite tune? The next one. The one I’m writing tonight or tomorrow. The new baby is always the favorite.

Hall, London,

1967

If “jazz’’ means anything at all, which is questionable, it means the same thing it meant to musicians fifty years ago—freedom of expression. | used to have a definition, but | don’t think | have one anymore, unless it is that it is a music with an African foundation which came out of an American environment. Duke Ellington

Duke Ellington at BBC-TV

rehearsal. London, 1964

: