12/24/07 - City of Heaven

Much of what I post about here probably seems dire or stark to a lot of people. Even though, for the most part, I consider what I read, watch and listen to to generally be uplifting. Mixed in with a little despair, for sure, but with a whole lot of hope and maybe even a little redemption, if ya look hard enough.

Would this get through to any of the luckies who've never really felt 'out of sorts' or ill at ease with the world for more than a day or two? I don't know, but there are times when I hear something that seems like it's from a place I've never been, from depths I've never felt, and I'm stopped in my tracks until i can figure out where it comes from.

Today I was listening to the 2CD Smithsonian/Folkways compilation "Voices of the Civil Rights Movement".



Voices of the Civil Rights Movement


I'd played the first of the two discs (the one that's heavier on sermons, chanting, clapping and call and response) a few times last summer and was about to file the collection away when I noticed blood curdling howls in the background of a solo gospel/piano song on disc 2 called "City of Heaven" by Cleo Kennedy.

I restarted the 9 minute long track and listened to the voices in the audience; noticing how they became increasingly affirmative as Cleo K. belted out her number.

"yes sir"
"sing it, sing it"!
"amen"
"HA HA. YEAH"!

Then, six minutes in, that voice in the background started howling. And this time I could understand that it was saying... YES. YES. YESSSSSSS.

Intense. True. Optimism not masked by elements of existentialism.

Forty+ years have passed, anon. congregationalist, and I am humbled.
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SFW40084
Voices of the Civil Rights Movement: Black American Freedom Songs 1960-1966
Various Artists


Notes - This double-CD reissue documents a central aspect of the cultural environment of the Civil Rights Movement, acknowledging songs as the language that focused people's energy. These 43 tracks are a series of musical images, of a people in coversation about their determination to be free. Many of the songs were recorded live in mass meetings held in churches, where people from different life experiences, predominantly black, with a few white supporters, came together in a common struggle. These freedom songs draw from spirituals, gospel, rhythm and blues, football chants, blues and calypso forms. The enclosed booklet written by Bernice Johnson Reagon provides rare historic photographs along with the powerful story of African American musical culture and its role in the Civil Rights Movement. "The music of the spirit with the history of the flesh." — New York Daily News