Black Music Kept the Minutes of America’s 250 Years

Five hundred schoolchildren in segregated Jacksonville sang “Lift Every Voice” before the country ever heard it; the music Black people made since is the fullest record of the republic’s 250 years.

Five hundred children stood in a segregated Jacksonville school on February 12, 1900, to sing for Abraham Lincoln’s birthday. Their principal, James Weldon Johnson, had written the words; their elder brother, J. Rosamond, had set them to music. The Stanton School choir raised their voices in a program that would never reach beyond a single, uncelebrated audience. The sheet music published alongside the words carried the sub-title “National Hymn for the Colored People of America” and was dedicated to Booker T. Washington. The brothers crossed the harbor to Broadway and the foreign service, but the children continued to sing. Black teachers copied the words into hymnals and school books through the Jim Crow South until the NAACP adopted “Lift Every Voice and Sing” as their official song in 1919, when it had already been performed by thousands for an audience of one.

Today, the United States turns 250, and the official program has selected its songs, its fireworks budget, its fresh faces in bronze. The math of the birthday is always a negotiation. Subtract the founding fathers and the Declaration and the Massachusetts Bay Colony and the Pilgrims and the Mayflower, and the United States turns 250. But add the ship that first landed some twenty Africans in Point Comfort, Virginia, in 1619, and the country’s been around another 170-some years. Historian Gerald Horne reads 1776 as a slaveholders’ rebellion against England’s abolitionist turn and has found himself in increasingly solitary possession of that view. The historians who disagreed have seen fit to document the dispute, most recently in the pages of the 1619 Project, which finds itself under similar siege. Frederick Douglass needed no academic scaffolding to declare that the Fourth of July belonged to other people, that it was not for him to deliver eulogies or pronouncements. He spoke from the condition of bondage and asked his white audience if it might not also be for others, including the enslaved, a question that has been returning every July 4th since.

Long before any anthem was sanctioned, the colonies forbade Black song. After Stono River slaves escaped in 1739, heading for Spanish Florida and carrying drums into the fight, the South Carolina legislature banned the very sound of them in the Negro Act of 1740. They could not be taught to read, either, or to write; the latter prohibition would follow throughout the South in the wake of Nat Turner’s revolt. What survived the bans was the voice. The spirituals carried scripture, sorrow, and working songs into a single line, and “Wade in the Water,” as hundreds of thousands of Black singers have passed it down through generations, instructed its listeners in the methods of making a scent trail, all under the guise of pious address. In New Orleans, Congo Square hosted the one sanctioned opportunity for drumming, and the enslaved men and women filled it every Sunday, replacing the rhythms that had been banned elsewhere in the land.

Nine students set out from Nashville in 1871 to sing their institution into existence. Fisk University did not yet have much in the way of endowment, and its surplus Union barracks provided the main campus attraction, but the treasurer hired a small choir to take to the road and back pay off its debts; Fisk Jubilee Singers charmed their way from white churches and through Europe, singing the songs their parents taught them in bondage. Audiences that refused to put them up in hotels wept their way through “Steal Away,” and the Queen of England received them with open arms. Enough money returned from their voyages to construct Jubilee Hall, the first permanent building in the South for Black higher education, and a business model was born. The songs, which would come to be known as the sorrow songs, were performed for the children of slave owners, their proceeds funding what their fathers would not, and the custom has endured to this day.

Ma Rainey would later record in 1928 that she had spent the night “walking out all night with a whole crowd of women.” Her clothes were nice, her collar and tie turned out, and she told the law and the church to get their proof somewhere else. Bessie Smith sang of leaving her menfolks and her earnings and the gin mills that had taken her life, and her catalogs sold in numbers that kept Columbia Records at work through the 1920s. Angela Davis read these same catalogues as manifestos, the utterances of working-class Black women on the subjects of travel, sex, and violence, long before any movement made the words its own. None of these women addressed their audiences in white, but the blues queens performed for domestics and dockmen who wrote to the companies about the records, and the openness with which black performers discussed white women was the reason preachers everywhere blamed the blues for the war. Behind the sanctified front was a private life that no census taker had ever managed to document.

Columbia Records had no use for “Strange Fruit” in 1939, and so the small Commodore label got the song. Abel Meeropol, a Bronx schoolteacher, had seen a photograph of a lynching and written the poem that became a song, and Billie Holiday performed it at the end of her sets in Café Society in Greenwich Village, where the waiters could expect the whole room to fall silent at the finish. The club had only one light, and it shone on her face when the set ended, and there was no encore. “Strange Fruit,” performed by a white jazz singer in a basement club, had entered the national songbook, and the major labels had no use for it.

The growl in “Hound Dog” belonged to Willie Mae Thornton, who cut the song in 1952 and spent the next seven weeks climbing the R&B charts, from the number fifty spot to the top. She had kept the check for one performance, and the single had bought her a $500 house. Elvis Presley’s version, cut in 1956, made him a star and a fortune, and the hound dog had entered the popular imagination, its authorship claimed by a white teenager the way “Tutti Frutti” belongs to Pat Boone, the way swing music got its Benny Goodman, its Paul Whiteman, and the original black bands worked the chitlin’ circuit. Chess and the other indies paid flat fees for the songs their artists recorded, and publishing took care of the rest. Rhythm and blues got its name changed to rock and roll somewhere along the way from the chitlin’ circuit to the white radio stations, and the transition took place without the involvement of its black creators.

Medgar Evers was shot in his driveway in June 1963; three months later, a bomb killed four girls waiting to start Sunday school in Birmingham. Nina Simone sat down at the piano and wrote “Mississippi Goddam” in the hour, or so it took to reach the town. A show tune, by her own description, in which she wasted no time in naming Alabama and Tennessee and wasting no words at all on the effect of her words, which she knew the Southern radio stations would return to her in the form of promotional singles, cut in half. Sam Cooke was turned away from a Shreveport motel with his wife a few years later, and he wrote “A Change Is Gonna Come” with strings in the verse asking “if there is life,” a gospel doubt embedded in a pop song, and he was dead before the winter that produced the single. Both songs are safe now in the Library of Congress, their authors’ voices preserved as national treasures two generations removed from the events they summoned into being.

The idea for “What’s Going On” began on a tour bus when the Four Tops’ Renaldo Benson saw police in Berkeley beating anti-war demonstrators in 1969. Marvin Gaye finished it with his brother Frankie in mind, three years after his discharge from Vietnam, when the boy had little to return to but the family dinner table. Berry Gordy refused to release it, protest being a bad look for a hit factory in the business of white crossover, but Marvin Gaye did not stop recording until Motown relented. The single was the fastest-selling record the company had ever put out, and the album that followed detailed police brutality, ecology, heroin, and taxes in a series of tracks that Gaye layered his own harmonies over for the chorus. A record company that sent its artists to finish school and to learn the proper dances for white television got its most mature recording to date, and it nearly got buried by the label that made it.

A Chicago radio DJ went on a rampage on July 12, 1979, and tossed a case of disco records into center field during a game at Comiskey Park. The White Sox had played the doubleheader, and the second game was forfeited when the crowd surged onto the field. The records in the case were largely black, Latin, and gay, the music having conquered the country by way of the Loft and the Paradise Garage. Larry Levan played for black and brown gay dancers until the morning clubs closed, and Chicago’s own Warehouse had opened two years earlier, Frankie Knuckles stretching and editing the local sounds into something new. House music got its name from the neighborhood, or so one version of the story goes, and the city’s record companies had been busy in the interim turning “One Nation Under a Groove” into a worldwide hit. Funkadelic had declared “One Nation Under a Groove,” a promise that the counter-brief to racism had already appeared in the title. It was the dance floor anthem of 1978, but by 1981 it sounded like something coming from the basement, where it was reborn in both Chicago and Detroit. House music crossed the Atlantic in the early Eighties, where it conquered the warehouses of Britain.

The Bronx had something to say in 1982, and its voice was called “The Message.” Broken glass, the reeking stairs, rats in the living rooms and repossession notices in the mail all made their first national appearance in a seven-minute song performed by Melle Mel and Duke Bootee, narrated by a city that no longer seemed to want the borough to survive. Six years later, N.W.A. took the complaint to the next level, and an assistant FBI director responded by sending a letter to their record company complaining about the song “Fuck tha Police,” a correspondence unique in the annals of the bureau. The letter may well have been unprecedented, but it did not appear again, not even when the next generation of musicians used the occasion of a police killing to file its own brief with the nation. Kendrick Lamar’s “Alright” was performed by protesters in Cleveland, Ohio, at a police line still in evidence the summer it was released, and Lil Baby, an Atlanta rapper with no protest credentials at all, delivered “The Bigger Picture” the week of George Floyd’s killing and appeared in marches himself the following days, addressing both sides of the street in a single verse about being bigger than black and white. “It’s bigger than Black and white.”

Marvin Gaye slowed “The Star-Spangled Banner” during an exhibition game at the 1983 NBA All-Star contest. The national anthem was always likely to have a Black singer or two waiting in the wings, but the NBA was not prepared for what happened next, as Whitney Houston belted it out over the Persian Gulf armada in 1991. The recording subsequently appeared on the charts, and again after the attacks of September 11. It was another Black singer who brought “Formation” and her dancers in berets to the Super Bowl in 2016, and again the police unions were quick to file their disapproval. Beyoncé’s halftime show performance of “Lift Every Voice and Sing” two years later drew largely favorable reviews from the press, but it was the children’s choir that carried the words into the next morning’s op-ed pages, and the NFL began playing the song before kickoff in the wake of the league commissioners’ apology for the players who had protested the anthem during the 2016 season.

So the birthday playlist writes itself, if you let it. Put “Lift Every Voice” next to the Star-Spangled Banner and let the two anthems carry on their hundred-year argument. Put “Strange Fruit” next to the fireworks and “Mississippi Goddam” next to the Founding Fathers and let the voices speak for themselves. The fun records should go there too, if you can bear to hear “One Nation Under a Groove” among the protest songs. The catalog of the Black experience holds as much music about living as it does about dying, and an honest accounting requires both. What Black people have recorded for the last quarter millennium happens to be the fullest description of the country anyone is likely to find, including the writers who pretend to have authored it. The children of Stanton school grew up, and their descendants were still singing “Lift Every Voice and Sing” when the Super Bowl organizers put the band together, and the stadium lights went dark. They knew the words to the dark song and the dawn anthem, as did their mothers, and as do their children, still finding their way through the darkness after 126 years. Whatever it is the United States has prepared for its 250th birthday, the music is already there; it has been running for a considerably long time, and it has plenty left.