“Taking the Stage”: ABC Reruns Three-Year-Old Show on Black Culture and It Still Hits Hard
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
On Wednesday, June 24 at 8 p.m. I watched an unusual presentation on ABC-TV, a rerun of a show they’d done 3 ½ years ago on the opening of the Smithsonian Institution’s Museum of African-American History, hosted (or at least introduced) by Oprah Winfrey and held at the Kennedy Center in December 2016) with the rather awkward title Taking the Stage: African-American Music and the Stories That Changed America. It was originally broadcast on ABC January 12, 2017 — eight days before Donald Trump took over from Barack Obama as President — and Barack and Michelle Obama were in the Presidential box, sometimes clapping and singing along. Not only did the sight of the Obamas in full Presidential regalia make me nostalgic for the days when we had a President not only of professional competence but personal integrity as well, it was amazing to see him recite the words as rapper Chuck D. of the pioneering group Public Enemy said, “Fight the Power!” (Actually one could imagine Donald Trump having similar sentiments, but his idea of “The Power” is the “Deep State” of Right-wing imagining, that collection of civil servants who faithfully serve Presidents of both major parties and therefore mark them as worthy purge targets under Trump’s Gleichschaltung.) The show opened with a brief snippet of a tribute to James Brown and then went into a salute to Harlem in the 1920’s and 1930’s, with Jon Batiste (Stephen Colbert’s music director), Patti Austin and the spectacular tap dancer Savion Glover doing Cab Calloway’s “The Jumpin’ Jive” and Duke Ellington’s (actually Billy Strayhorn’s) “Take the ‘A’ Train.” The versions heard on this show were considerably louder and more raucous than the originals — a recurring problem throughout the program (Donald Vroon, editor-publisher of the American Record Guide, wrote in his current July-August 2020 issue that just about all music, including “classical” music, is getting louder because “[t]he pop composers have adapted to the fact that you have to make a big impression in the first 30 seconds”) — but still a lot of fun.
Then there was an odd tribute to Marian Anderson’s famous concert on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1939 (held outdoors because the originally slated venue, ironically called Constitution Hall, was owned by the Daughters of the American Revolution and they refused to allow a Black performer to appear there; Eleanor Roosevelt resigned her DAR membership in protest — good for her! — and she and Harold Ickes, Roosevelt’s Secretary of the Interior, arranged for the outdoor concert in its place) in which they gave the assignment to sing Anderson’s opening song from the concert, “My Country, ’Tis of Thee,” not to one of the African-American singers who have successfully made their careers in opera and classical music after Anderson broke the color line, but to … Mary J. Blige. Actually Blige’s rendition, though it had nothing to do with Anderson’s sort of music, was a beautiful bit of soul singing — but one wishes the show had done more for the long history of Black singers in classical music. (One name I discovered almost by accident via an online reproduction of a Paramount Records ad was Florence Cole Talbert, Marian Anderson’s voice teacher and a huge talent in her own right: she recorded the Bell Song from Delibes’ Lakmé and brought more power, mystery and drama to that hackneyed aria than anyone I can think of besides Maria Callas — no doubt just one of many great voices kept by racism from having the sort of career she deserved. Hear it yourself at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=56kd69bBmlw and see if you don’t agree with me.)
The next number was Gary Clark, Jr. and the Alvin Ailey Dance Theatre paying a tribute to the blues, with Clark doing a couple of choruses of Muddy Waters’ “Rollin’ Stone” (though not, alas, the final chorus that gave the Rolling Stones their name) and the Ailey troupe doing a short excerpt of their famous ballet Revelations that included “Wade in the Water” and “Didn’t My Lord Deliver Daniel!” with two women in white dresses and a blessedly topless male cavorting on stage in a dance that didn’t have much to do with the blues but was still a lot of fun (and the man was tall, slender and incredibly agile — he reminded me of Earl “Snake Hips” Tucker in the 1935 Duke Ellington short film Symphony in Black). The next number was an odd combination of singer-guitarist Dave Grohl (who I think was the only white performer on the bill) and someone or something called “Troublefunk” doing a cover of Jimi Hendrix’ “Crosstown Traffic” which was so far off base from the original I didn’t recognize it at first. The next number was a cover of Aretha Franklin’s “Dr. Feelgood” by the modern singer Fantasia, whose voice lies higher than Aretha’s did but she understood the style and embraced it effectively. Then Usher did a four-song tribute to James Brown — “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag” (with that killer guitar lick that impressed me no end when I was growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area in the late 1960’s; while the white psychedelic-rock bands seemed to be trying to make a virtue of sloppiness, these Black musicians were perfectly disciplined and played tightly together), “I Feel Good,” “Say It Loud (I’m Black and I’m Proud)” and “Sex Machine.” I wish he’d done “Say It Loud” last, and Usher isn’t as rough and searing in his energy as the original, but it was a good tribute and, though he doesn’t move the way Brown did, he’s agile and flexible when he dances.
Then there was an odd tribute to the great Black jazz singers — introduced by the odd statement that the only place you could go to hear them was Black nightclubs, which flatly wasn’t true: the three singers represented, Billie Holiday, Lena Horne and Sarah Vaughan, all played venues in the white community (in 1939 Billie headlined at Café Society, the first New York nightclub with an integrated audience), featuring Christina Aguilera, Cynthia Erivo and someone I didn’t recognize whose name, as best I could make it out from a hurriedly barked-out announcement, was “Renée Elise Goldspell.” Ms. Whatever-Her-Name-Is kicked off the proceedings with “Misty,” a jazz instrumental by Erroll Garner to which lyrics were added later for Sarah Vaughan to sing (though Johnny Mathis had the hit — unfortunately, since he simply didn’t understand Garner’s modern-jazz world the way Sarah did), followed by Erivo doing Billie Holiday’s “God Bless the Child” and Aguilera tearing her way through “Stormy Weather.” This was offered as a tribute to Horne, though before she sang it in a 1943 musical of that title it had been introduced over 10 years earlier by Ethel Waters at the Cotton Club — and of course I lamented the great Black singers they weren’t paying tribute to, including Waters, Ella Fitzgerald and the incomparable Dinah Washington. (As great as Aretha Franklin was, she didn’t do anything Dinah hadn’t done first — and there were things Dinah could do that Aretha never could, like sing jazz.) The show then veered into tributes to African-American athletes (notably boxers Joe Louis and Muhammad Ali) and Blacks in the U.S. military: there was a moving on-stage reunion of the six surviving Tuskegee Airmen and a story about how they had to fight their war in their own all-Black unit because the U.S. military was still segregated. During the war the NAACP launched a campaign called the “Double V,” which meant victory in World War II and victory against racism at home, and one little-known fact about the explosion of African-American civil rights activism in the 1950’s and 1960’s was that a lot of Black veterans, having returned home from a war in which they were nominally fighting for freedom and against racism, came home to the same old racist crap they’d been dealing with before. It would have been nice, however, if someone on the show had mentioned that World War II was the last U.S. war in which Black servicemembers had to fight in segregated units: in 1948 President Harry Truman issued an executive order desegregating the U.S. military, and he used a lot of political capital to make sure it stuck.
Afterwards there was a salute to Black stand-up comedians, featuring Jackie “Moms” Mabley (an amazing performer from whom Whoopi Goldberg ripped off almost all her act), Dick Gregory, Nipsey Russell, Redd Foxx, Richard Pryor and Eddie Murphy. Once again I was annoyed by who wasn’t included — I wasn’t really expecting a mention of Bill Cosby because he’s been “unpersonned” after the successful conviction of him on date-rape charges, but what about Godfrey Cambridge (whose joke about how he could never buy a flesh-colored Band-Aid — “They don’t come in my flesh color!” — has been repeated recently by Black Lives Matter supporters) or Flip Wilson? Then the music resumed with one of the original performers who’s not only alive but whose voice was as good as ever, Gladys Knight, heard on “Midnight Train to Georgia” and “I Heard It Through the Grapevine.” I’ve made this point many times before but it bears repeating: the great Black soul voices were not “untrained.” They were trained as children in Black church choirs by the choir directors, who drilled them in the basics of singing soul — which requires as disciplined a vocal technique as singing opera. The chief victims of the myth of the “untrained” Black soul voice have been white singers who’ve believed it and thought that all you had to do to sing soul was stand in front of a band and scream. Janis Joplin’s career would not have lasted much longer than it did even if she’d lived — it’s all too obvious from her surviving performances on records and film how she was destroying her voice — and we’ve heard what trying to sing soul without the proper training can do to white women’s voices with people like Bonnie Tyler and Stevie Nicks. After Gladys Knight’s performance — easily the musical highlight of the evening — John Legend came out with his familiar tribute to Marvin Gaye, doing “What’s Goin’ On?” acceptably but without the searing power of Gaye’s original.
Then there was another high point, Herbie Hancock representing all of Black jazz (which, of course, was an impossible task for just one person), playing his star-making 1962 hit “Watermelon Man” first on a standard piano, then on a synthesizer and finally on one of those instruments that cross-breeds a keyboard and a guitar, so keyboard players can come out from behind their instruments and hop and bop on stage just like guitar players. After that was a section I found surprisingly moving: a tribute to rap (or “hip-hop,” which is what you call it if you like it) that began with Common reciting a poem by Langston Hughes, then segued into Chuck D. from Public Enemy doing “Fight the Power” and Doug E. Fresh reciting “Give It All You Got.” A surprising number of people in the auditorium, including then-President Obama, knew the words well enough to recite along with them, and though the performers started doing drum-machine impressions towards the end, for the most part I found the performance moving because I actually got to hear the words of these pieces without the cacophonous din that usually goes on behind them and drowns many of them out. (I’ve said a lot of nasty things about rap over the years, and one of them is that if you’re going to eliminate melody and harmony from music and reduce it to just lyrics and rhythm, the very least you can do for your audience is make it possible to understand the words.)
Next came the long-overdue tribute to Black Gospel music — which is really where the roots of it are: all African-American music (which has really been most or all of the world’s popular music since ragtime, and then jazz, exploded in the early 20th century) comes from spirituals and gospel. The performers included Shirley Caesar, Mary Melle, Donnie McClurkin and the Howard University Gospel Choir, and while the music was contemporary instead of traditional gospel, it was excellent and Caesar took charge with a song called “I’m Going There.” For me the show could have ended right there, but the producers had one more formidable talent to present: Stevie Wonder, who led the finale. At first I was puzzled that Wonder — who began his performance by saying, “Tomorrow our children will make history — at least those who survive,” driving home the Black Lives Matter message with the force and precision of a stiletto — did the song “Love’s in Need of Love,” a nice piece but one which had me thinking, “Hey, Stevie, why not something more anthemic, like ‘Higher Ground’ or ‘Sir Duke’?” Then he did do “Higher Ground” and it became the big finale on which the rest of the cast joined in. Taking the Stage was for the most part a quite remarkable program — though I suspect one reason ABC-TV dredged up this 3 ½-year old show was that CBS is doing something similar, with some of the same performers, tomorrow night, Sunday, June 28 — and despite my nit-picking about the great Black artists and entertainers who weren’t mentioned it was a worthy tribute to the depth and scope of the African-American culture the Smithsonian’s new museum is honoring.
On Wednesday, June 24 at 8 p.m. I watched an unusual presentation on ABC-TV, a rerun of a show they’d done 3 ½ years ago on the opening of the Smithsonian Institution’s Museum of African-American History, hosted (or at least introduced) by Oprah Winfrey and held at the Kennedy Center in December 2016) with the rather awkward title Taking the Stage: African-American Music and the Stories That Changed America. It was originally broadcast on ABC January 12, 2017 — eight days before Donald Trump took over from Barack Obama as President — and Barack and Michelle Obama were in the Presidential box, sometimes clapping and singing along. Not only did the sight of the Obamas in full Presidential regalia make me nostalgic for the days when we had a President not only of professional competence but personal integrity as well, it was amazing to see him recite the words as rapper Chuck D. of the pioneering group Public Enemy said, “Fight the Power!” (Actually one could imagine Donald Trump having similar sentiments, but his idea of “The Power” is the “Deep State” of Right-wing imagining, that collection of civil servants who faithfully serve Presidents of both major parties and therefore mark them as worthy purge targets under Trump’s Gleichschaltung.) The show opened with a brief snippet of a tribute to James Brown and then went into a salute to Harlem in the 1920’s and 1930’s, with Jon Batiste (Stephen Colbert’s music director), Patti Austin and the spectacular tap dancer Savion Glover doing Cab Calloway’s “The Jumpin’ Jive” and Duke Ellington’s (actually Billy Strayhorn’s) “Take the ‘A’ Train.” The versions heard on this show were considerably louder and more raucous than the originals — a recurring problem throughout the program (Donald Vroon, editor-publisher of the American Record Guide, wrote in his current July-August 2020 issue that just about all music, including “classical” music, is getting louder because “[t]he pop composers have adapted to the fact that you have to make a big impression in the first 30 seconds”) — but still a lot of fun.
Then there was an odd tribute to Marian Anderson’s famous concert on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1939 (held outdoors because the originally slated venue, ironically called Constitution Hall, was owned by the Daughters of the American Revolution and they refused to allow a Black performer to appear there; Eleanor Roosevelt resigned her DAR membership in protest — good for her! — and she and Harold Ickes, Roosevelt’s Secretary of the Interior, arranged for the outdoor concert in its place) in which they gave the assignment to sing Anderson’s opening song from the concert, “My Country, ’Tis of Thee,” not to one of the African-American singers who have successfully made their careers in opera and classical music after Anderson broke the color line, but to … Mary J. Blige. Actually Blige’s rendition, though it had nothing to do with Anderson’s sort of music, was a beautiful bit of soul singing — but one wishes the show had done more for the long history of Black singers in classical music. (One name I discovered almost by accident via an online reproduction of a Paramount Records ad was Florence Cole Talbert, Marian Anderson’s voice teacher and a huge talent in her own right: she recorded the Bell Song from Delibes’ Lakmé and brought more power, mystery and drama to that hackneyed aria than anyone I can think of besides Maria Callas — no doubt just one of many great voices kept by racism from having the sort of career she deserved. Hear it yourself at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=56kd69bBmlw and see if you don’t agree with me.)
The next number was Gary Clark, Jr. and the Alvin Ailey Dance Theatre paying a tribute to the blues, with Clark doing a couple of choruses of Muddy Waters’ “Rollin’ Stone” (though not, alas, the final chorus that gave the Rolling Stones their name) and the Ailey troupe doing a short excerpt of their famous ballet Revelations that included “Wade in the Water” and “Didn’t My Lord Deliver Daniel!” with two women in white dresses and a blessedly topless male cavorting on stage in a dance that didn’t have much to do with the blues but was still a lot of fun (and the man was tall, slender and incredibly agile — he reminded me of Earl “Snake Hips” Tucker in the 1935 Duke Ellington short film Symphony in Black). The next number was an odd combination of singer-guitarist Dave Grohl (who I think was the only white performer on the bill) and someone or something called “Troublefunk” doing a cover of Jimi Hendrix’ “Crosstown Traffic” which was so far off base from the original I didn’t recognize it at first. The next number was a cover of Aretha Franklin’s “Dr. Feelgood” by the modern singer Fantasia, whose voice lies higher than Aretha’s did but she understood the style and embraced it effectively. Then Usher did a four-song tribute to James Brown — “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag” (with that killer guitar lick that impressed me no end when I was growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area in the late 1960’s; while the white psychedelic-rock bands seemed to be trying to make a virtue of sloppiness, these Black musicians were perfectly disciplined and played tightly together), “I Feel Good,” “Say It Loud (I’m Black and I’m Proud)” and “Sex Machine.” I wish he’d done “Say It Loud” last, and Usher isn’t as rough and searing in his energy as the original, but it was a good tribute and, though he doesn’t move the way Brown did, he’s agile and flexible when he dances.
Then there was an odd tribute to the great Black jazz singers — introduced by the odd statement that the only place you could go to hear them was Black nightclubs, which flatly wasn’t true: the three singers represented, Billie Holiday, Lena Horne and Sarah Vaughan, all played venues in the white community (in 1939 Billie headlined at Café Society, the first New York nightclub with an integrated audience), featuring Christina Aguilera, Cynthia Erivo and someone I didn’t recognize whose name, as best I could make it out from a hurriedly barked-out announcement, was “Renée Elise Goldspell.” Ms. Whatever-Her-Name-Is kicked off the proceedings with “Misty,” a jazz instrumental by Erroll Garner to which lyrics were added later for Sarah Vaughan to sing (though Johnny Mathis had the hit — unfortunately, since he simply didn’t understand Garner’s modern-jazz world the way Sarah did), followed by Erivo doing Billie Holiday’s “God Bless the Child” and Aguilera tearing her way through “Stormy Weather.” This was offered as a tribute to Horne, though before she sang it in a 1943 musical of that title it had been introduced over 10 years earlier by Ethel Waters at the Cotton Club — and of course I lamented the great Black singers they weren’t paying tribute to, including Waters, Ella Fitzgerald and the incomparable Dinah Washington. (As great as Aretha Franklin was, she didn’t do anything Dinah hadn’t done first — and there were things Dinah could do that Aretha never could, like sing jazz.) The show then veered into tributes to African-American athletes (notably boxers Joe Louis and Muhammad Ali) and Blacks in the U.S. military: there was a moving on-stage reunion of the six surviving Tuskegee Airmen and a story about how they had to fight their war in their own all-Black unit because the U.S. military was still segregated. During the war the NAACP launched a campaign called the “Double V,” which meant victory in World War II and victory against racism at home, and one little-known fact about the explosion of African-American civil rights activism in the 1950’s and 1960’s was that a lot of Black veterans, having returned home from a war in which they were nominally fighting for freedom and against racism, came home to the same old racist crap they’d been dealing with before. It would have been nice, however, if someone on the show had mentioned that World War II was the last U.S. war in which Black servicemembers had to fight in segregated units: in 1948 President Harry Truman issued an executive order desegregating the U.S. military, and he used a lot of political capital to make sure it stuck.
Afterwards there was a salute to Black stand-up comedians, featuring Jackie “Moms” Mabley (an amazing performer from whom Whoopi Goldberg ripped off almost all her act), Dick Gregory, Nipsey Russell, Redd Foxx, Richard Pryor and Eddie Murphy. Once again I was annoyed by who wasn’t included — I wasn’t really expecting a mention of Bill Cosby because he’s been “unpersonned” after the successful conviction of him on date-rape charges, but what about Godfrey Cambridge (whose joke about how he could never buy a flesh-colored Band-Aid — “They don’t come in my flesh color!” — has been repeated recently by Black Lives Matter supporters) or Flip Wilson? Then the music resumed with one of the original performers who’s not only alive but whose voice was as good as ever, Gladys Knight, heard on “Midnight Train to Georgia” and “I Heard It Through the Grapevine.” I’ve made this point many times before but it bears repeating: the great Black soul voices were not “untrained.” They were trained as children in Black church choirs by the choir directors, who drilled them in the basics of singing soul — which requires as disciplined a vocal technique as singing opera. The chief victims of the myth of the “untrained” Black soul voice have been white singers who’ve believed it and thought that all you had to do to sing soul was stand in front of a band and scream. Janis Joplin’s career would not have lasted much longer than it did even if she’d lived — it’s all too obvious from her surviving performances on records and film how she was destroying her voice — and we’ve heard what trying to sing soul without the proper training can do to white women’s voices with people like Bonnie Tyler and Stevie Nicks. After Gladys Knight’s performance — easily the musical highlight of the evening — John Legend came out with his familiar tribute to Marvin Gaye, doing “What’s Goin’ On?” acceptably but without the searing power of Gaye’s original.
Then there was another high point, Herbie Hancock representing all of Black jazz (which, of course, was an impossible task for just one person), playing his star-making 1962 hit “Watermelon Man” first on a standard piano, then on a synthesizer and finally on one of those instruments that cross-breeds a keyboard and a guitar, so keyboard players can come out from behind their instruments and hop and bop on stage just like guitar players. After that was a section I found surprisingly moving: a tribute to rap (or “hip-hop,” which is what you call it if you like it) that began with Common reciting a poem by Langston Hughes, then segued into Chuck D. from Public Enemy doing “Fight the Power” and Doug E. Fresh reciting “Give It All You Got.” A surprising number of people in the auditorium, including then-President Obama, knew the words well enough to recite along with them, and though the performers started doing drum-machine impressions towards the end, for the most part I found the performance moving because I actually got to hear the words of these pieces without the cacophonous din that usually goes on behind them and drowns many of them out. (I’ve said a lot of nasty things about rap over the years, and one of them is that if you’re going to eliminate melody and harmony from music and reduce it to just lyrics and rhythm, the very least you can do for your audience is make it possible to understand the words.)
Next came the long-overdue tribute to Black Gospel music — which is really where the roots of it are: all African-American music (which has really been most or all of the world’s popular music since ragtime, and then jazz, exploded in the early 20th century) comes from spirituals and gospel. The performers included Shirley Caesar, Mary Melle, Donnie McClurkin and the Howard University Gospel Choir, and while the music was contemporary instead of traditional gospel, it was excellent and Caesar took charge with a song called “I’m Going There.” For me the show could have ended right there, but the producers had one more formidable talent to present: Stevie Wonder, who led the finale. At first I was puzzled that Wonder — who began his performance by saying, “Tomorrow our children will make history — at least those who survive,” driving home the Black Lives Matter message with the force and precision of a stiletto — did the song “Love’s in Need of Love,” a nice piece but one which had me thinking, “Hey, Stevie, why not something more anthemic, like ‘Higher Ground’ or ‘Sir Duke’?” Then he did do “Higher Ground” and it became the big finale on which the rest of the cast joined in. Taking the Stage was for the most part a quite remarkable program — though I suspect one reason ABC-TV dredged up this 3 ½-year old show was that CBS is doing something similar, with some of the same performers, tomorrow night, Sunday, June 28 — and despite my nit-picking about the great Black artists and entertainers who weren’t mentioned it was a worthy tribute to the depth and scope of the African-American culture the Smithsonian’s new museum is honoring.
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