Chicago music and the soul of a president (Globama loves Chicago music, and it shows)

Chicago Sun Times ^ | January 11, 2009 | DAVE HOEKSTRA

[weegee]

Barack Obama loves Chicago music, and it shows: In his speeches, he echoes the ideals — hope, tolerance, determination — heard in the songs of such local greats as Sam Cooke, the Staple Singers and Curtis Mayfield

President-elect Barack Obama paid homage to Chicago soul in his Grant Park acceptance speech. He riffed on Wendell Phillips High graduate Sam Cooke by saying, “It’s been a long time coming, but tonight, because of what we did on this day, at this defining moment, change has come to America.”

This clearly expands on Cooke’s 1963 hit “A Change Is Gonna Come.”

But connect the dots.

Sam Cooke led to the Staple Singers message songs. Cooke and his brothers hung out with Pervis Staples, Lou Rawls and a young Mavis and Yvonne Staples on 33rd Street. The strip was called “The Dirty Thirties,” and most of the group attended Doolittle School on 35th Street.

The Staples were mentored in part by the late Curtis Mayfield — who started the Impressions with current Cook County Commissioner Jerry Butler. Mayfield and Butler grew up in Cabrini-Green. One of Mayfield’s house producers was the late Chicagoan Donny Hathaway, who had a 1970 hit with “The Ghetto, Pt. 1.” And almost all of this talent was spiritually connected with Chicago’s fertile gospel field that ranges from Thomas A. Dorsey to Mahalia Jackson.

Yes, we can say Chicago is more than a blues town.

The unbending spirit of the 1960s and ’70s Chicago soul movement helped put Obama on that stage.

Chicago artists delivered countless songs of inspiration during the civil rights struggle: the Staple Singers hits “Respect Yourself,” “I’ll Take You There” and “Long Walk to D.C.” Mayfield’s “People Get Ready,” “Keep on Pushing” and “Choice of Colors” (magnificently arranged by Hathaway).

“Keep on Pushing” gets a shoutout on the “Soul Music Lovers For Obama” section of the official campaign site my.barackobama.com, which states, “From the inner cities to the suburbs, Sen. Obama unites us like the music we love.”

The daring fury in Chicago soul comes from the forthright nature of the city. “Our music was like a Band-Aid to make people feel better about what was going on,” Mavis Staples once told me. “We were getting requests to sing ‘We Shall Overcome.’ I never liked to sing that song. I felt ‘We Shall Overcome’ implied that we weren’t making it. Like we weren’t going forward. So we started with our own. ‘(March Up) Freedom’s Highway.’ ‘Touch a Hand, Make a Friend.’

“Positive stuff telling people that ‘I challenge you to bridge the gap between us.’ ”

The president-elect’s mannerisms remind Staples of Cooke — the way he walks, the way he wears dignity and grace.

“Obama has that same walk Sam did with [the gospel group] the Soul Stirrers,” Staples said. “If somebody was on the stage gettin’ in the house and the ladies were about to shout, S.R. Crain [Soul Stirrers founder] would send Sam down the middle aisle with this cool walk. And all of the attention would go to Sam. Every time I see Obama I think of Sam Cooke. Sam used to make me swoon, and this guy does the same thing.

“But I can control myself now.”

Cooke learned to tap out a declared beat with his feet during his years with the Soul Stirrers, a “walking rhythm” perfected by his business partner J.W. Alexander in the Pilgrim Travelers. “Like Obama, Sam had the walk of someone who is very sure of himself,” his younger brother L.C. Cooke said from his home in south suburban Calumet City. “It’s someone who definitely knows where they are going. There’s even similarities in the way Obama moves his hands. Sam had those gestures, too.”

The president-elect’s acceptance speech struck a chord. “I loved that moment,” said Cooke, 75. “It was history, and it showed you the foresight Sam had.”

In October 1963, Sam Cooke was arrested after trying to integrate the Shreveport, La., Holiday Inn. After talking to sit-in demonstrators in North Carolina that same year, Cooke began to write “A Change Is Gonna Come.” Soul legend Solomon Burke once told me that had Cooke not been killed in 1964, he would have become Sen. Sam Cooke.

“Everybody loved Sam,” his brother said. “Not only the men loved him, but the women loved him.”

While Cooke had a kaleidoscopic following, Jerry Butler’s favorite message song is “Choice of Colors,” released by Mayfield in 1969.

“In substance and in terms of the condition of the people, ‘Choice of Colors’ was head and shoulders above a lot of the songs,” Butler said. “ ‘A Change Is Gonna Come’ was so poignant and prophetic.”

Butler then sang the opening verse of “Choice of Colors”:

If you had a choice of color, which one would you choose, my brothers?

If there was no day or night

Which would you prefer to be right?

How long have you hated your white teacher

Who told you to love your black preacher?

Butler stopped. And then exclaimed, “Oooh, boy! The little guy [Mayfield] was a genius.”

Butler left the Impressions in 1959, although Mayfield continued to write most of his hits. Butler’s biggest solo hit was 1969’s “Only the Strong Survive.” He explained, “That said different things to different people. Kenny [Gamble, who co-wrote the song with Butler and Leon Huff] coined the phrase, ‘The message is in the music.’ And a group of kids out of Prairie View [A&M] in Texas took that song as a black anthem. I went out there to perform not knowing this was the big song on campus.”

Butler, 69, has been a Cook County Commissioner since 1985. Obama consulted with Butler twice on his ascent through Chicago politics. “Once he told me he was going to run against Bobby Rush [in the 2000 Democratic primary for the U.S. representative],” Butler said. “I told him not to do it. Bobby is a street fighter, he has a strong organization and he would get beat up. And he did. Next time he asked what I thought about him running for U.S. Senate. I said after what happened to Carol [Moseley Braun, who lost to Republican Peter Fitzgerald in her 1998 re-election bid], he would probably walk over [any opponent] to the Senate seat. But at the time nobody could convince me that all this would come from that.”

Chicago disc jockey Herb Kent was in the trenches. His radio station WVON (Voice of the Negro) raised money for the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s Operation Breadbasket, which became Operation PUSH. Kent and Stevie Wonder were emcees at Soldier Field for King’s last Chicago appearance in the summer of 1967.

In recent years Obama appeared twice on Kent’s Saturday afternoon “Battle of the Best,” where celebrity guests take on Kent in playing songs and soliciting votes for an R&B artist. “About four years ago I get this call that Sen. Obama wants to be on my show,” Kent said. “I had never heard of him. I think it was a way of getting him known to the public.

“The second time he was on he had Sam Cooke and I had Lou Rawls. He said, ‘How can I win with this old stuff?’ Then he went on the air and started appealing [Cooke] to all the ladies going to church. He played Sam Cooke songs and whupped my butt. I don’t get beat too often. He was just that smart. He wasn’t like he didn’t know Sam, it was, ‘Why do you want to go that far back?’

“He quotes soul music a lot. He’s not a hip-hop person.”

Although Obama was just 3 years old when “Keep on Pushing” was released in 1964, Kent sees Chicago soul music as a fire beneath the inaugural flame. “ ‘Keep on Pushing’ was a black power thing,” said Kent, who attended Hyde Park High School. “We were all trying to gain equality. Outside of Chicago, James Brown was singing, ‘I don’t want anybody getting anything I’m getting myself.’ I don’t remember Jackie Wilson doing anything of that nature. Motown? Maybe later with Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder. We don’t have message songs now. Especially like the Staple Singers songs that were spiritual and R&B.”

Al Bell shaped the Staple Singers hits at Stax Records. He produced most of their material and wrote their smash hit “I’ll Take You There” (see related story). He has a new Web site and online soul music radio station albellpresents.com.

“Chicago was 360 degrees of African-American music and culture,” Bell declared from his office in Little Rock, Ark. “Gospel. Blues. Rock ’n’ roll like Chuck Berry [at Chess Records]. Vee-Jay Records had Jimmy Reed and the Staple Singers.

“Chicago was the catalyst for what Stax became — make no mistake about it. The Chicago Defender, Ebony and Jet wrote about us when we couldn’t get one line in the Memphis Commercial Appeal or maybe one line in our black newspaper.”

Bell knew from the jump that the Staple Singers were the most powerful conduit in his Stax stable to sing political material.

“They were natural,” said Bell, 68. “They had a sound unlike any other in America. No one sang harmony like the Staple Singers. And they had Pops’ [tremolo] guitar.” In 1958 Bell was working for a Little Rock radio station and booking gospel artists. He brought the Staple Singers in from Chicago to play a six-city Arkansas tour with headliner C.L. Franklin, Aretha’s father.

“We wound up at a high school in Pine Bluff, Ark.,” he said. “It was the first time I had seen Mavis sing as a solo artist. She sang ‘I’m on My Way to Heaven Anyhow.’ At that moment Mavis penetrated me like I had never been penetrated before. She started crying as she sang. Before I knew it I was crying with her.”

After Bell was named Stax executive vice president in 1968, bringing the Staple Singers to the label became a priority. “They spoke to people in a way that motivated and inspired.

“Soul music was a reflection of what was going on in our lives and our lifestyles.”

[weegee]

I threw up a little in my mouth.

[weegee]

Rock and Rollbama PING!

[whitedog57]

Voiced by Chicago students:

“don’t know much ‘bout history,
Don’t know much biology.

But I do know that I do drugs.
And all my friends are gangbanging thugs.

What a wonderful world this could be.”

[GodBlessRonaldReagan]

I don’t want anybody getting anything I’m getting myself

Geez, did they ever mangle that! The lyric is "I don't want nobody givin' me nothin', open up the door, I'll get it myself". Testify, James!

Not to mention "You got to live for yourself, yourself and nobody else". Who knew James Brown was an Objectivist?!?

[andy58-in-nh]

Just more of the same ObamaMania!^® from the media. But I must say that Barack could do a lot worse in his choice of music than digging on Sam Cooke; the man was an awesome songwriter and performer. If he likes Chicago Blues, that would be even better, but his general demeanor of inauthenticity makes me wonder whether he would even recognize the work of Buddy Guy, Junior Wells, Otis Spann or Jimmy Cotton.

[ETL]

"This clearly expands on Cooke’s 1963 hit 'A Change Is Gonna Come.'"

Obami's "Change" message is about socialist or communist takeover.

__________________________________________________________

Saul Alinsky on "Change"...
From Rules for Radicals, Alinsky outlines his strategy in organizing, writing:

"There's another reason for working inside the system. Dostoevsky said that taking a new step is what people fear most. Any revolutionary change must be preceded by a passive, affirmative, non-challenging attitude toward change among the mass of our people. They must feel so frustrated, so defeated, so lost, so futureless in the prevailing system that they are willing to let go of the past and change the future. This acceptance is the reformation essential to any revolution."

Saul Alinsky, The Latter Rain
http://latter-rain.com/ltrain/alinski.htm
__________________________________________________________

"The Communist Party USA views the 2008 elections as a tremendous opportunity to defeat the policies of the right-wing Republicans and to move our country in a new progressive direction.

The record turnout in the Democratic Presidential primary races shows that millions of voters, including millions of new voters, are using this election to bring about real change. We wholeheartedly agree with them."

http://cpusa.org/article/articleview/907/1/4/
__________________________________________________________

Raila Odinga's official website:
"Your Agent For Change", "Register For Change", "Vote For Change"
http://www.raila07.com/

Must see video of Obama in Kenya campaigning for his Marxist thug 'cousin'!:
Barack Obama & Raila Odinga REDUX:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b63bBCC2-yM&feature=related

__________________________________________________________

The Communist Party USA (CPUSA):
"We are a party of unity in action. We are an integral part of every struggle and movement for change to eliminate poverty and joblessness, against racism and for full equality. We are participants, initiators and leaders of every movement to make life better now and much better in a socialist future." Yeah, so they supported an oppressive dictator, like the Repubs and Democrats haven't? The CP is still around, has apologized for that whole Stalin thing, and has a quickly growing youth section.
[see: MichaelMoore.com-->Links-->PoliticalAction (bottom of the page--CPUSA promo)]
http://www.michaelmoore.com/links/index.php?linkType=Political%20Action
__________________________________________________________

"Barack Obama told supporters that
'change has come to America' as he
claimed victory in a historic presidential election."

http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/11/04/election.president/index.html

[weegee]

"I don't want NOBODY to give me NOTHING, Open up the door, I'll get it MYSELF".

and that's just the NAME of the song...

http://www.funky-stuff.com/jamesbrown/Interviews/Hammer_interview.htm

(Steve) Hammer Interview: James Brown
A chat with the Godfather of Soul (June 1996)

HAMMER: My favorite song of yours is “I Don’t Want Nobody to Give Me Nothing (Open the Door, I’ll Get it Myself).” How did that song come about?

JB: That song still remains, because of the fact that there are a lot of things closed to blacks, Hispanics, women. There are a lot of people who think they’re in the system, but they’re really not in the system. Uh, any time an Afro-American kid, 9 or 10 years old, can get up and say “Mama, I think I’m gonna study hard because I want to be president,” and have a shot at being president, then we’ve got America. Other than that, we’ve got a name and we’re trying to find out what it means. Uh, one day, when you can go on any side of town and not be frantic, or curious, about what might happen to you, and be at home at any place in America, we won’t have to worry about “Say It Loud (I’m Black and I’m Proud).” We won’t have to worry about those songs by, uh, Joan Baez or Janis Joplin and John Lennon, that they made in the Sixties. That’s what we’re trying to do. We’re trying to let people know that, hey, don’t give me nothin’, just open up the door, and if I don’t earn it, then I don’t earn it. I want you to quote me as saying this — “If I become a bum, then let me become a bum by my own choice.” Then, if I become a bum, don’t label me as a nigger bum, just let me be a bum. Now, that’s pride.

HAMMER: Uh...

JB: That didn’t make you jump when I said the word “nigger,” did it?

HAMMER: No, sir.

JB: We’re talking about situations. If we’re talking about the lower South, they called the whites the “crackers.” That still is there, but hopefully we don’t use those words any more. That day should be over with. We should judge a man by the content of his character, not the color of his skin, like Dr. Martin Luther King said. But now, we don’t have to worry about that, they worry about what their social security number is and are they paying taxes.

[weegee]

How much Chicago blues was homegrown and how much transplanted there because of Chess/Checker Records?

Sam Phillips recorded the artists in Memphis and then sold the recordings firs to the Bihari brothers and later to Leonard Chess.

[RichInOC]

He’s Dead. He’s Rested. He’s Ready.

...Jake Blues 2012.

[andy58-in-nh]

Absolutely - a lot of blues music was transplanted from the South, for sure, but many of its artists were in Chicago long before Barack Obama entered this world in Kenya, er, I mean Hawaii. ;-)

Buddy Guy was from Louisiana originally, and moved to Chicago in 1957. Junior Wells was from Memphis, but was working in Chicago by the late 1940's, while Muddy Waters (form Mississippi, of course) had moved to the Windy City before the US entered WWII. Otis Spann also moved up north in the '40s, began working with Howlin' Wolf sometime in the early 1950s. Amazing amount of talent represented right there.

[Ranger Warrior]

“Well we’re Movin’ on Up!
Movin’ on Up!
To the east side!
Movin’ on Up!
To a dee-luxe apartment in the sky,
We’re movin’ on up!
Movin’ on Up!
To the east side!
Movin’ on Up!
We’ve finally got a piece of the pie!”

[dennisw]

This is a good article
The 0boma slant is minimal
These Black musicians were giants and from a better time and place. 0 is a pipsqueak compared to them but he tries to ride their reputation. 0 has no slave blood so he’s a fraud from the get go and Bobby Rush knew this

Michelle 0bama “might” be more of a genuine fan

[dennisw]

How much Chicago blues was homegrown and how much transplanted there because of Chess/Checker Records?

Sam Phillips recorded the artists in Memphis and then sold the recordings firs to the Bihari brothers and later to Leonard Chess.

The down home Southern blues got transplanted up to Chicago because Southern blacks moved up there for factory jobs post WW2. This was going on even before WW2. And in Chicago they got electrified

[weegee]

Reading about how Sam Cooke and Barack Soetoro are “alike” was sickening.

Might as well compare him to Milli Vanilli too. The industry knew the scam and gave them a singing award (Grammy).

[weegee]

There was a similar migration to Cleveland. But some artists recorded in cities OTHER than Chicago and yet somehow got associated as being Chicago artists.

Eventually, the talent moved where the labels were.

There are some other articles this week blaming the decline of the Detroit music influence on Barry Gordy moving Mowtown to California.