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Nina Simone in 1970

Photo by David Redfern/Redferns

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Nina Simone's 'Black Gold' At 50 black-gold-50-how-nina-simone-refracted-black-experience-through-reinterpreted-songs

'Black Gold' At 50: How Nina Simone Refracted The Black Experience Through Reinterpreted Songs

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The High Priestess of Soul took songs from Appalachia and the musical "Hair" and charged them with civil-rights poignancy
Morgan Enos
GRAMMYs
Jun 11, 2020 - 10:13 am

When Black lives and needs are highlighted on the world stage, contrarians tend to crawl out of the woodwork in response. "Why can’t we celebrate White History Month?" they ask each February. "Don’t all lives matter?" they ask the rest of the year. This line of questioning is nothing new. More than 50 years ago, Nina Simone offered a rejoinder to bad-faith ideas of reverse inclusivity while onstage at Philharmonic Hall (now David Geffen Hall) in New York City.

"[This next song] is not addressed primarily to white people,” the singer-songwriter deadpanned. "It does not put you down in any way; it simply ignores you." The crowd burst into laughter, but Simone wasn’t joking: "My people need all the love and inspiration that they can get." Simone then laid into "To Be Young, Gifted and Black," a song meant to elevate and encourage Black intellects. "We must begin to tell our young / There’s a world waiting for you,” she appealed, abetted by the male vocal duo the Swordsmen.

For The Record: "To Be Young, Gifted And Black"

That version of "Young, Gifted and Black"—which she co-wrote with lyricist Weldon Irvine in memory of "A Raisin In The Sun" playwright Lorraine Hansberry—appears at the end of Black Gold, Simone's album pulled from that 1969 concert. It was nominated for a Best R&B Vocal Performance, Female at the 13th Annual GRAMMY Awards and turns 50 this year. Aside from that song, the live album consists of canon-crossing covers Simone curated to refract her own meaning, such as "Black is the Colour of My True Love’s Hair," "Ain’t Got No, I Got Life," and "Who Knows Where the Time Goes?"

These songs are not typically associated with social issues; respectively, they’re an Appalachian folk song, a Sandy Denny tune and two cuts from the musical "Hair." But true to her skill as an interpreter, Simone turned these apolitical songs into unlikely vehicles for radical self-expression. "This is a quest that’s just begun," she sang on "To Be Young, Gifted and Black," but Simone was in the center of her own personal and political struggle that dovetailed with the nationwide struggle for racial equality. 

Four years earlier, she'd hollered her incendiary classic "Mississippi Goddam" in front of 10,000 people near the end of the Selma to Montgomery March. Just one year prior, Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated on a hotel balcony. "We can’t afford any more losses," Simone said shakily while performing "Why? (The King of Love Is Dead)" three days after Dr. King’s murder at Westbury Music Fair. Her voice grew tremulous: "Oh my god, they’re shooting us down one by one."

"As the civil rights movement really swung into high gear, she swung into high gear with it," Simone’s musical director and accompanist Al Schackman said in the 2015 documentary What Happened, Miss Simone? "To me, we are the most beautiful creatures in the whole world, Black people," she stated in an interview clip shown in the film. "My job is to make them more curious about where they came from, and their own identity, and pride in that identity. That’s why I try to make [my songs] as powerful as possible—mostly just to make them curious about themselves."

Black Gold shows how Simone not only made her songs powerful, but others' as well. She doesn’t offer specifics about her choice to open with "Black is the Colour of My True Love’s Hair," a traditional ballad that can be traced back to Scotland. But given the themes interwoven throughout the rest of the album—and its cover, in which Simone proudly sports an Afro—it's arguable she meant to cast natural hair as a crown of beauty. Simone wasn’t always magnanimous about this topic.

"You used to be talking about being natural and wearing natural hairstyles," Simone tartly told a Philadelphia audience in 1979, chiding Black women for making what she considered to be stereotypically Caucasian fashion choices. "Now you’re straightening your hair, rouging your cheeks and dressing out of Vogue."

Simone didn’t only address the topic of hair—she reinterpreted songs from "Hair." In 1968, when the musical first hit Broadway, she picked up on "Ain’t Got No" and "I Got Life" and she added them to her repertoire. Her mash-up of those two "Hair" tracks, one a lament ("Ain’t got no mother, ain’t got no culture / Ain’t got no friends, ain’t got no schoolin'") and the other an affirmation ("Got my hair, got my head / Got my brains, got my ears") is charged with connotations of Black oppression and liberation. 

The resulting "Ain’t Got No, I Got Life," which originally appeared on 1968’s ‘Nuff Said!, was a major hit in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands. The following year, the 5th Dimension’s "Medley: Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In (The Flesh Failures)" would embed "Hair" further into public consciousness. But Simone, as usual, was ahead of her time: "I did that tune ‘Ain’t Got No’ just when the show came out," she said on a promotional interview LP that accompanied Black Gold. "Long before ‘Aquarius’ and all of that."

Black Gold also features a cover of psychedelic folkies Fairport Convention's "Who Knows Where the Time Goes?" from their 1969 album Unhalfbricking. Sandy Denny wrote the wise-beyond-her-years ballad ("So come the storms of winter and then the birds in spring again / I have no fear of time / For who knows how my love grows?") when she was only 19; Simone was attracted to the song’s theme of self-examination.

"It’s a song not meant for me," she explained of "Who Knows Where the Time Goes?" on Come Together With Nina. "I sing it to make people reflect about their lives. I know what I’m doing and why I must do it. And so time does not exist for me as it does for most people."

Simone certainly didn’t live like most people following the release of Black Gold. In 1970, believing that "Mississippi Goddam" and its ilk hurt rather than helped her career, she fled what she later called the "United Snakes of America" for Barbados. Then, in 1974, she relocated to Liberia, where, as What Happened, Miss Simone? lays out, her daughter Lisa Simone alleged she experienced physical and mental abuse from her mother. In the mid-1980s, Simone lived in various European cities, where she experienced a brief career resurgence before her death in 2003 at age 70.

Black Gold remains a nexus point in Simone’s life and career—between her early innovations and later provocations, between her incisiveness as a songwriter and her genius as an interpreter. "There’s a great deal of rapport between the audience and myself that has been missing in so many of the previous albums," she said of Black Gold on Come Together With Nina, adding, "There’s a great deal of electricity in this album."

Without a handful of brilliantly chosen, left-field covers as a conducting agent, that current may never have been transferred, her alchemy unachieved. But as usual, Simone made black become gold.

The Impressions' "People Get Ready" At 55: How Curtis Mayfield Created A Musical Balm For Black America

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Curtis Mayfield

Curtis Mayfield

Photo: Gilles Petard/Redferns

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The Impressions' "People Get Ready" At 55: How Curtis Mayfield Created A Musical Balm For Black America

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The socially conscious soul great responded to a string of national atrocities with a peaceful redemption song
Morgan Enos
GRAMMYs
Jun 7, 2020 - 1:02 pm

In August 1963, a throng of roughly 250,000 Americans, nearly 80 percent of them Black, marched on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., advocating for racial harmony and demanding economic equality. One month later, Ku Klux Klan members killed four young Black girls in the infamous 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, Ala. Two years later, Malcolm X was assassinated at the Audubon Ballroom in New York City. Soon after, some 600 demonstrators marched across Alabama, from Selma to Montgomery, to demand equal voting rights for Black people, only to be met by plumes of tear gas from police and law-enforcement officers as white spectators watched and jeered on the sidelines.

All of these events happened nearly 60 years ago. Today, as thousands of demonstrators around the world take to the streets and social media to protest the killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, David McAtee and many other Black people at the hands of police, we'd be remiss to forget that America has been here before. But back in the days of Martin Luther King Jr., we had a multitude of musicians of color—John Coltrane, Marvin Gaye, Aretha Franklin and many others—who compassionately commented on society's convulsions. One of the tenderest, most talented among them was Curtis Mayfield.

The singer, songwriter and guitarist is best known for his solo career throughout the 1970s—namely, his GRAMMY-nominated soundtrack to Gordon Parks Jr.'s 1972 blaxploitation classic, Super Fly. But his signature song is "People Get Ready," his gossamer 1965 ode to deliverance written for his launchpad group, The Impressions. Featuring a gospel lilt and drawing themes from his upbringing in his grandmother's Traveling Soul Spiritualists' Church, the beatific ballad faces down recent American nightmares and offers not the sword in return, but a safe passage to paradise.

Mayfield joined The Impressions in 1957, back when they were called The Roosters, alongside vocalists Sam Gooden, Jerry Butler, who would be replaced by Fred Cash the following year, and brothers Arthur and Richard Brooks. The group knocked out a rapid series of hits like 1958's "For Your Precious Love," 1961's "Gypsy Woman" and 1963's "It's All Right." Despite their accolades, their Blackness meant trouble for the group while touring through the Deep South.

"Oh lord, it was rough," Cash said in Traveling Soul: The Life Of Curtis Mayfield, the 2016 biography from Mayfield's son, Todd Mayfield. "We were just scared to death a lot of times," Cash said, recalling the hassles the group experienced with soundpeople and the police. 

While staying in all-Black boarding houses, Curtis Mayfield often brooded alone and wrote while his bandmates went out celebrating. "I'd sit in my room and live through my own fantasies and write," he was quoted as saying in the book.

Despite the racism they faced, their hits were lucrative, especially the Mayfield-penned "It's All Right." "That song bought Sam's home, Curtis' home, and my home; we all bought homes off that song," Cash exclaimed in Traveling Soul. "By twenty-one, twenty-two years old, we all had our own homes and Cadillacs in the doggone garage." 

Some activists took the song's affirmative lyrics—"Hum a little soul, make life your goal / And surely something's got to come to you"—as something more profound: a call to empowerment. This came as a surprise to its writer.

"My father didn't mean it that way," Todd stated in Traveling Soul. "He wasn't quite mature enough as an artist." Still, Mayfield didn't fight this reading; the song's countercultural ripple effect, however minor, expanded his mind. That same year, Bob Dylan released "Blowin' In The Wind," while Sam Cooke put out "A Change Is Gonna Come" in response. Both songs, charged with personal and sociopolitical import, resonated with Mayfield and inspired him to dig deeper artistically.

"He was a big-picture thinker," Todd explained in Traveling Soul. "He wasn't the type to pick up a sign and start marching or get involved in the day-to-day machinations of the movement. Rather, he could observe it from a wide angle and use his poetic mind to craft something that spoke to peoples' souls."

In 1964, The Impressions took two more artistic steps in "Talking About My Baby," which featured a heavier gospel influence in its call-and-response, and "Keep On Pushing," Mayfield's first major statement as a topical songwriter: "A great big stone wall stands there ahead of me / But I've got my pride and I move the wall aside and keep on pushing / Hallelujah! Keep on pushing." (When an astonished Cash asked Mayfield how he wrote it, he simply responded, "I'm living.")

Soon after, Mayfield faced a quick series of extreme life changes: His brother Kirby died of an enlarged heart, he left his wife Helen and he moved into an opulent apartment on the second-highest floor of Chicago's Marina Towers. On December 11, 1964, a motel operator fatally shot his idol Sam Cooke in what was ruled a "justifiable homicide." The following February, Malcolm X's assassination shook him even further. These rattling events could have inspired a rattled response. Instead, Mayfield converted the turmoil into a tranquil hymn.

From its twinkling first seconds, "People Get Ready" casts a different type of spell than common doo-wop tracks: It joins The Velvet Underground's "Pale Blue Eyes," George Harrison's "All Things Must Pass" and Bill Fay's "Be Not So Fearful" in the pantheon of songs that rapidly lower the blood pressure. It might be Zen if it weren't Christian to the core: Mayfield takes the readymade blues trope of a locomotive leaving the station and recasts it as a caravan to Zion. "There's a train a-comin'," he sings, "You don't need no baggage / You just get onboard."

For people of color struggling with anger, shock and sorrow, "People Get Ready" was a balm. "It was the same train that formed the Underground Railroad during slavery," Todd Mayfield wrote in Traveling Soul. "It was the movement train my father's generation boarded, determined to get to a better place or die trying."

"People Get Ready" launched to No. 14 on the U.S. pop charts and became deeply entwined with the civil rights movement. Chicago churches even began integrating it into their services, swapping the line "Don't need no ticket / You just thank the Lord" for "Everybody wants freedom / This I know." However it was tweaked, "I can remember [the song] just making people listen," Mayfield is quoted in his son's biography about the singer. "It was so different from what was looked upon as a hit."

The song comforted Black Americans across the nation. Major artists were listening, and paying attention, too. Bob Dylan, one of Mayfield's heroes, recorded "People Get Ready" during the sessions for 1975's The Basement Tapes, again as part of the 1975 rehearsals for his Rolling Thunder Revue tour, and a third time for the 1990 film, Flashback. Al Green, Aretha Franklin, Dusty Springfield and Alicia Keys all gave the song their own unique shades, to say nothing of Jeff Beck, The Doors and U2, who all performed it live at some point. In 1998, the first year of its eligibility, the song was inducted into the GRAMMY Hall Of Fame. (Mayfield himself received the GRAMMY Legend Award in 1994 and the Recording Academy's Lifetime Achievement Award in 1995.)

With his reputation as a progressive artist cemented, Mayfield burned brightly throughout the 1970s on the strength of Super Fly as well as acclaimed solo albums like Curtis (1970), Roots (1971) and the live album Curtis In Chicago (1973). His commercial fortunes waned in the 1980s, and in 1990, he suffered a monumental setback when a freak lighting accident paralyzed him from the waist down. In 1999, he died at 57 due to complications from type 2 diabetes.

"People Get Ready" still hovers over all of Mayfield's myriad hits like a divine ball of caring energy. As the struggle for racial equality reaches its modern-day boiling point, the iconic song feels evermore like an extended hand, a reminder that the downtrodden are cared for, beckoning Black lives and allies to band together and climb aboard.

Want To Support Protesters And Black Lives Matter Groups? Here's How

Ethan Sultry and ToonsOne

(L-R): ToonsOne and Ethan Sultry

 

Photo Courtesy of Artist

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George Floyd, Breonna Taylor And Elijah McClain Are Drifting From The National Discourse—These Musicians Remind Us To "Say Their Names"

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With the help of a group of diverse artists, Los Angeles producer Ethan Sultry keeps the Black Lives Matter conversation alive in the visceral, new jazz track
Morgan Enos
GRAMMYs
Dec 11, 2020 - 3:33 pm

There's never been a day online like #BlackoutTuesday this past summer, a cacophony of black squares and soapbox proclamations in reaction to the killing of George Floyd. But six months after the nationwide protests that ensued, you'd be hard-pressed to find much of anything about police killings of Black people: a black square, an infographic, a hashtag. According to Google Trends, searches for "George Floyd," "Breonna Taylor" and "Elijah McClain" have flatlined in recent months.

Even if the online movement is past its shelf life, this didn't deter Ethan Sultry. For the Los Angeles producer, reducing the extinguishment of Black lives to a meme is repulsive in the first place. His new track, "Say Their Names," fully encompasses his anger toward the whole situation.

"I certainly was not concerned about timing [the release of the song] with some moment. People have told me, 'Oh, that's over.' It's unbelievable. 'It's not relevant anymore.' I've been told that!" Sultry incredulously tells GRAMMY.com. "As far as music goes, it's not relevant for what? For sale? What, it doesn't time with the death of someone? It makes me so angry that that is even in the picture. This is the truth, this is the horror. This is the racism that we live in, and it's not going away. Within the art world that we live in, where are we going wrong that that's even a question? That shouldn't even be on the table. We are artists."

Today (Dec. 11), Sultry unveils a visceral, new jazz track, "Say Their Names," six months after we called on our peers to post — or, in many cases, not post — a black square on Instagram. The song features numerous session cats, most of whom live in the L.A. area: vocalists Cedric Myton and Maiya Sykes, saxophonist Katisse Buckingham, pianist Ruslan Sirota, bassist Benjamin Shepherd and percussionist Diego Álvarez Muñoz.

Stream "Say Their Names" below and donate to MyGood, a charity benefiting families who have lost loved ones to police violence.

Sir Sultry Music · 01 Say Their Names

"I'm usually someone who avoids all slogans and clichés in my writing, but for this instance, it felt like there should be no other title than 'Say Their Names,'" Sultry explains. "No matter how many artists did a song called 'Say Their Names,' 'Say Her Name,' 'Say His Name,' whatever it was, everyone needs to be yelling it at the same time—loud, loud, loud."

The lightbulb moment to write "Say Their Names" came a day after Sultry marched in downtown L.A. Initially, he felt too old to participate in the protests. 

"I just said, 'You know what? If you were 25, 30, you'd be doing this. So what? You're 40, so do it anyway,'" Sultry says. "It's always good to go, even when sometimes you don't know why exactly. I mean, I knew why I was going, but sometimes you just have to go because something else happens. I got in it, and sure enough, it inspired this piece."

Sultry, who lived with and learned from Gypsy musicians for more than a decade, didn't start by picking up an acoustic guitar. Instead, he established the pulse by way of clapping, mapping out drum patterns on Logic Pro X and beatboxing into a microphone. 

Due to COVID-19 restrictions, Sultry assembled the rest of the song in a piecemeal fashion, drawing from tracks recorded at five different studios. First, Muñoz, a revered cajón player and multiple Latin GRAMMY nominee, swung by the studio and replaced Sultry's makeshift grid with his percussion.

"It was an amazing experience because everything came from his mind," Muñoz tells GRAMMY.com. "When we started to record, I didn't understand what he wanted. I was just following his direction because I didn't have a song or tune or something to follow. He just pre-produced everything beforehand. And when we started to build instrument by instrument, step by step, at the end of the session, I was like, 'My goodness!' It was a wall of percussion."

Diego Alvarez

Diego Alvarez  | Photo: Sari Makki

Sultry included a Venezuelan percussionist because of the context and lineage of Muñoz's art form. For example, "It has a clave in it," Sultry says of the percussion arrangement. "The clave is so much more important than we give it credit for, because clave is one of the main rhythms that the slaves and their descendants were playing in all of the islands. Then it becomes different things over time. So it becomes protest music and a rebellious beat later."

While dictating Shepherd's bass part, Sultry combed through the language of flamenco, a musical form of which he's intimately familiar. "The bass combines jazz walking with my instruction to follow a bunch of push-patterns that would be similar to flamenco," the producer explains. "By not identifying the harmony on the bass real clear and by the accents not always falling where you would anticipate, that creates a floating vibe out of the song. In my opinion, it makes it easier for someone to hear it and know it's not a normal song. It's a spiritual, ethereal thing."

For the woodwinds, Sultry tapped Katisse Buckingham, who plays in his quintet. Buckingham is best known for recording the music in the famous "jazz flute" scene in the 2004 comedy, Anchorman: The Legend Of Ron Burgundy, and for playing on Dr. Dre's 1992 classic, The Chronic. From his home studio, Buckingham recorded alto, tenor and baritone saxophone, and alto, bass and standard flute. For added emotional impact, Sultry gave him a jarring instruction for how to approach his solo.

"For the first saxophone solo, he was like, 'Imagine you're an African woman during the slave trade, and your husband is being pulled away from you,'" Buckingham tells GRAMMY.com. "He would paint that picture. Hopefully, he brought out those types of images."

Read: Aminé Talks New Album 'Limbo,' Portland Protests And Black Lives Matter

Sultry recruited Cedric Myton, a Rastafarian singer, for the first vocal part. "Cedric has been in the fight against systemic racism his entire life, so there's your truth right there," Sultry explains. "This is not someone who jumped on the boat this year. He's been doing it his entire life, and his entire message has been against systemic racism."

For a supplemental vocal part, Sultry went with Maiya Sykes. As with his other casting calls, this was the result of weighty consideration, not just a flight of fancy. "There's a real purpose behind the calls that I make," Sultry says. "I go through a very purposeful process. I'm very sensitive about who I might go about doing this with. It has nothing to do with fame or name recognition. The power of a name has nothing to do with the process for me."

Sultry went with Sykes, with whom he's recorded for years, for her facility as a jazz singer and her lifelong commitment to social justice. "Maiya worked amazingly in the song," he says. "She not only embodied the female aspect of it, but bridged a little bit of the space left between Cedric and the instrumentation. The way I led Maiya's session in the song was to try to make it all kind of make sense with what Cedric had done." 

(L-R): Ethan Sultry and Maiya Sykes

(L-R): Ethan Sultry and Maiya Sykes | Photo: Sari Makki

As activists go, Sykes is the real deal. Her mother was on the frontlines against apartheid, and to hear her tell it, she's been attending rallies and protests since she was in diapers. "My relationship with Black Lives Matter is quite simple: I'm Black," she tells GRAMMY.com. "I have no choice but to say, 'I need you to recognize me and see me equally—not just me, but my counterparts.' 

"What the Black Lives Matter movement is to me is not just inclusion, but the recognition that Black people, like every other group of people, are not a monolith," Sykes continues. To that end, she had passed on a litany of protest songs that she saw as propagandistic pablum. "I turned down a lot of them because I felt it was a bunch of sign-waving or phrases or mantras I've heard before," she says. "One reason I liked this song was that it presented itself differently. It's the same idea presented with some intricacies and some simple things. The juxtaposition of those two things stands out for me. You almost have to go for the obvious title to grab someone's attention, but upon listening, you realize it's a more intricate presentation of this idea, which is what drew me to it."

Read: Want To Support Protesters And Black Lives Matter Groups? Here's How

For piano, Sultry went with Ruslan Sirota for his edgy comping abilities. His crossover-jazz Rolodex is more impressive than most. "I think when I'm old, I'm going to think about this a lot: how I found myself in that intersection with folks like Thundercat, Seamus Blake, a lot of the guys on the wave right now," Sirota tells GRAMMY.com. "I'm so happy to have run into these people more than a decade ago when we were all wet behind the ears, running around with our gear, trying to get a gig. Now, what do you know? These are the folks that reflect the culture back at itself."

Sirota considers the simplicity of the song's title versus its teeming, multifarious music. "It might be wise to consider that there's a whole world behind the meme as well," he says. "Everything's as deep as you are, right? Everything is as profound as you're willing to go. A conclusion is often the point where one got tired of thinking. There's more to most things—and certainly to an issue as contentious and consequential as this—than might meet the eye. But sometimes, just as memes are a good vessel to communicate profound ideas to people quickly, so, too, is a song title. It can set a little bit of a framework and context for people to bite into more than they otherwise would."

Say Their Names Artwork

"Say Their Names" Artwork

Toons One, a multimedia artist in the graffiti and hip-hop realms, conceptualized and painted the cover for "Say Their Names." The image features the faces of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery as well as industrial-style typography riddled with bullet holes. 

"For me, lettering has been a powerful way of getting my message across through the art that I do," Toons tells GRAMMY.com. "Trying to come up with something that would be timeless is very important to me." 

GRAMMY winner Dave O'Donnell, who's famous for working with James Taylor, Keith Richards and John Mayer, mixed the track; Paul Blakemore, the senior mastering engineer at Concord Jazz, mastered the track.

Can a song genuinely change the world in a practical, boots-on-the-ground sense? What happens between a song about police brutality appearing on the planet and a police officer not extrajudicially killing a Black citizen?

"The practical step, I think, is amplifying a social conversation," Sirota says. "Because whenever you see an outcome of the sort that you mentioned, where there's an actual, practical implementation of police reform, it's always the result of multiple causes. The endgame is to amplify social conversation to where things are being prioritized to be looked at, which only ever happens through social pressure of sorts."

What if that social pressure goes too far? "I think we ought to be cautious that it's not turned into a religion, which it could easily be," Sirota continues. "Because this is when it stops being taken seriously, ironically. Because then we're not scholars with numbers on our sides; we're just a bunch of people projecting our high school issues on our political grievances. That's the one thing about which we ought to be careful. This needs to have a tangible side of more than slogans, of numbers and statistics and concessions when we went overboard in our enthusiasm. Otherwise, it just becomes something where the politicians say, 'Oh yeah, they had TikTok, now they have BLM.'" 

Sultry says donating to MyGood, which Macy Gray founded last summer, is a practical step toward making a difference. "I like the clarity and the honesty of what I see about MyGood. It's just very clear," he says. "'If you donate, the money goes to the victims' families, and here are some of the ways.' What better way to donate than to say, 'What do these families need?' This happened to them in their household. This is their son, their brother, their sister, their mother. What do they think? I want to hear what they say, their opinions. I want them to have the microphone."

Ruslan Sirota

Ruslan Sirota | Photo Courtesy of Artist 

The musicians on "Say Their Names" are not an ideological monolith or mouthpieces for an organization. From their backgrounds to their life experiences to their views, they're utterly diverse. The bottom line is that they meet on one key issue: police killings of Black Americans must end today. If these musicians had sweated insignificant rhetorical differences, they might have never completed the song.

"I hope, if nothing else, it sparks some conversation," Sykes says. "To me, that's the essence of democracy. What we're lacking is political discourse. Political discourse means you and I can get into a room and talk about ideas. We might disagree, but we can talk about them cogently and with respect and, in the end, feel like everyone is satisfied. We've lost that completely, and that's disheartening."

"The small actions of millions change things," she continues. "Yeah, you can get frustrated and feel fed up and think, 'I can't do much.' But if a million of us do some tiny action, that means we take one big step forward. That's all we can do every day: some small thing. You can be very pie-in-the-sky about this in an esoteric conversation, but I do realize that whole changes got made because one person was like, 'Listen, I've got a big-ass idea, but I need 20 of y'all to help me carry this through.'"

This involves not dropping the mantle of Black lives when one gets tired of it, but playing, rapping and singing about Black victims of police brutality into 2021, 2022, 2023 and beyond. Instead of brooding on the edges of our beds or dragging would-be allies on Twitter, Sykes asks that we shake off the self-pity, get out of our heads and engage with this topic in any way we can, which may start with a simple conversation.

"There's this intense disheartening that's coupled with shame. 'Why didn't I see this? Why didn't I act?'" Sykes says. "That's not helpful. We have to get into a dialogue where if we're going to move forward, let's be progressive about it in our inclusion. I'm not asking you to be ashamed about it. I'm asking you to be proactive." 

In the spirit of patience and understanding, casting away infighting and misplaced aggression, we'll say their names until there are no more names to be said.

Amid Black Lives Matter Conversations, Black Latinx Artists Urge Non-Black Latinx To Do Better

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(L-R) John Turturro, Tim Blake Nelson and George Clooney in 'O Brother, Where Art Thou?'

(L-R) John Turturro, Tim Blake Nelson and George Clooney in 'O Brother, Where Art Thou?'

Photo: Universal/Getty Images

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'O Brother, Where Art Thou?' At 20 o-brother-where-art-thou-20-year-anniversary

20 Years Ago, 'O Brother, Where Art Thou?' Crashed The Country Music Party

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In honor of the 20-year anniversary of the GRAMMY-winning album, GRAMMY.com spoke to the creative minds behind the groundbreaking soundtrack, including T Bone Burnett, Dan Tyminski, Luke Lewis and others
Jim Beaugez
GRAMMYs
Dec 5, 2020 - 1:29 pm

The Coen Brothers' 2000 tragicomedy O Brother, Where Art Thou?, set in Mississippi during the Great Depression, pulls deeply from the early-20th century American songbook to drive the film's Homeric storyline, which entangles the lives of escaped convicts Delmar O'Donnell (Tim Blake Nelson), Pete Hogwallop (John Turturro) and Ulysses Everett McGill (George Clooney).

But while nearly all 19 tracks on the original soundtrack, released December 5, 2000, are once-popular songs enshrined in the Library of Congress, the music wasn't designed to be a hit outside the world of the Soggy Bottom Boys, the film's fictional band composed of the main characters. "Old-Time Music is Very Much Alive!" trumpets the faux Nashville Banner headline in the liner notes to the film's original soundtrack, "But you won't hear it on 'country' radio." 

The prophecy proved true. The popularity of O Brother, Where Art Thou? didn't help traditional music break into radio programmers' playlists—the single for "I Am A Man Of Constant Sorrow" peaked at No. 35 on the Billboard Hot Country Songs chart—but it didn't matter. The soundtrack sold more than 8 million copies in the U.S., certified eight times platinum, and won Album Of The Year at the 44th GRAMMY Awards.

On that February evening in 2002, bluegrass legend Ralph Stanley stunned the audience at the Staples Center in Los Angeles with an a cappella performance of "O Death," a traditional folk song featured on the soundtrack, delivered by the then-73-year-old under a single spotlight in the middle of the darkened arena. (Stanley went on to win the Best Male Country Vocal Performance GRAMMY for the track that night.)

"Having Ralph Stanley stand on a stool in the middle of the room and sing 'O Death' was the pinnacle of my entire career," Luke Lewis, whose Lost Highway label released the soundtrack and who also led the Nashville operations of Mercury, MCA and UMG at various points, tells GRAMMY.com. "I was sitting with a bunch of f*cking gangster rappers who were completely blown away."

But the odyssey began long before a host of country, gospel and bluegrass ringers upturned the industry on music's biggest night—before the Coen Brothers even began filming, in fact.

In the spring of 1999, producer T Bone Burnett convened at Sound Emporium in Nashville with a who's who of roots musicians from the city's vibrant bluegrass scene, including Gillian Welch and Alison Krauss & Union Station, to put the song cycle to tape. Lewis, who was just beginning to assemble Lost Highway Records as a creative haven for roots artists like Lucinda Williams, caught wind of the sessions and went to investigate.

"I walked into that creative process when all that was going on, and the Coen Brothers are hanging, T Bone's in there," Lewis recalls. "All these amazing artists come in there and do the record old school, with a mic in the middle of the room."

Classics such as "I'll Fly Away," "You Are My Sunshine" and "In The Jailhouse Now"—the latter sung by actor Tim Blake Nelson—are rendered slower and lower than typical bluegrass interpretations. That was an intentional move, Burnett says, to capitalize on the bass response of the subwoofer-loaded sound systems in movie theaters.

"The first thing we did was stretch the sonic spectrum that bluegrass was ordinarily recorded in, which was very high—the banjo was high, the singing was high, the violins were high, the mandolins were high—and we lowered it a couple of octaves and approached it more as a rock 'n' roll album rather than a traditional bluegrass record."

While Krauss took lead vocals on "Down To The River To Pray," elsewhere collaborating with Welch and Emmylou Harris on "Didn't Leave Nobody But The Baby," her Union Station guitarist Dan Tyminski was asked to audition for the cut of a lifetime: singing lead on "I Am A Man Of Constant Sorrow," the hit Soggy Bottom Boys song "sung" by George Clooney in the film. 

"I was happy to do it, but I honestly didn't feel like it made a lot of sense," Tyminski remembers. "I didn't necessarily see myself sounding like Clooney's voice at the time, but it's hard to see from your own perspective what other people see or hear. So, I went back and auditioned the next day, and somehow [I] got it, and just couldn't have been more shocked at what would follow."

Read: 'O Brother, Where Art Thou?' Soundtrack | For The Record

The brains behind the soundtrack were just as surprised when the film opened in France, prior to its stateside debut, and sold 70,000 copies of the album within a month. It was a hint of what was to come in the U.S. 

As the film's signature song, "I Am A Man Of Constant Sorrow" helped drive the soundtrack to the No. 1 spot on the Billboard 200, where it spent 15 weeks during a 683-week run on the chart.

The song became Tyminski's calling card, but he almost didn't get to play it. After his version was done and filming had begun, Clooney himself asked to take a pass at the vocal. Tyminski went back to the studio on a day off from shooting and backed him on guitar.

Explore The 'O Brother, Where Art Thou?' OST

"George is actually a really great singer and had learned the song well, and he sang a killer version of it," Burnett says. "But it didn't have the thrill in it that Dan's version had. And so I just said, 'This is great, but we're supposed to be making a movie about a hit record, and now we've got something that sounds like a hit record, so I think we should stick with that. What do you think?' And I think he was relieved, really."

Tyminski says the recording process also played a role in the decision to use his version. "It's not that he couldn't do the job," he says, "but for the sake of the movie, it had to be one take, live, no fixes. It was all really pure, all very organic. 

"After he had taken a couple of swings at it and got the words jumbled a couple of times, he says, 'Dan, I'll make you a deal: I'll act, you sing.' And quite honestly, I was so disappointed because I thought it was so cool to have recorded the song with Clooney. At the time, it felt like that was a bigger deal than singing the song myself. It wasn't until a little bit later that I realized what a loss that would have been. It ended up being the biggest song of my career, easily."

Read: Exclusive: Gillian Welch On Vinyl, Songwriting, 'O Brother...' & More

Tracking down the writers of songs composed nearly a century earlier proved to be an enormous job for Burnett and Denise Stiff, who managed Welch and Union Station. The songs were recorded and re-recorded over the decades, and many versions were unique enough to support their own copyrights. That meant when Burnett used or rewrote an arrangement, they had to determine which previous version of the song was closest and credit the right people. 

"'Man Of Constant Sorrow' has, I think, 50 copyrights in the Library Of Congress," Burnett says. "The one we worked with most closely was The Stanley Brothers' version. Even though we had done our own arrangement, we could've gotten sued by 50 people for infringement."

The version of "I Am A Man Of Constant Sorrow" recorded for the film earned Tyminski a GRAMMY for Best Country Collaboration With Vocals at the 2002 GRAMMYs. In addition to the Album Of The Year win, the soundtrack also won for Best Compilation Soundtrack Album For A Motion Picture, Television Or Other Visual Media, while T Bone Burnett won for Producer Of The Year, Non-Classical.

Two decades later, it's hard to say what lasting impact the success of O Brother, Where Art Thou? made on contemporary country music, or popular music in general. The widespread acclaim for the film and soundtrack is undeniable, and they both made gobs of money. But it could be argued—and Burnett does—that a revival of roots music was already underway when it all hit. 

"The reason I think it was so successful [was] because, one, there was already a very strong traditional music trend," Burnett says. "Kids were learning how to do it."

So-called "alt-country" bands like Wilco and Old 97's were impacting the lower rungs of industry charts, along with Jayhawks, Whiskeytown and others. Bluegrass trio Nickel Creek had hooked up with Krauss and released their 2000 self-titled, platinum-selling album, while bluegrass-adjacent bands Old Crow Medicine Show and The Avett Brothers were beginning to make names for themselves on the touring circuit. 

"Certainly, country radio didn't change, and you wish for things like that to happen," Lost Highway founder Lewis says. "But it makes you aware that there's a wider world than what you hear on mainstream radio, and for a lot of people who really love music, you need something to lead you down the path because it's hard to find guideposts to things you might like. I think O Brother had that sort of impact."

There's another reason, too, Burnett suggests. On the night of the 2002 GRAMMYs, Americans were still reeling from the September 11 terrorist attacks that took place just five months earlier. Tony Bennett and Billy Joel sang a duet on "New York State Of Mind," a nod to the resilience of the city amid tragedy. Alan Jackson performed "Where Were You (When The World Stopped Turning)" in front of children's art created in reaction to the attacks in New York, Washington, D.C., and Pennsylvania. And in the middle of it all, Ralph Stanley stood on the GRAMMY stage, alone and vulnerable, pleading with his maker, "Won't you spare me over for another year?"

"Art responds to events without the artists meaning to at all," Burnett says. "The Beatles weren't responding to Kennedy's assassination, and yet everything about The Beatles felt like the thing that we needed the most after the Kennedy assassination. People were looking for our identity as Americans. Why did we get hit like this? Who were we?"

While the music of O Brother, Where Art Thou? offered millions of Americans the comfort of nostalgia, it impacted others in more material ways.

"It did amazing things for the artists that were involved," Lewis says. "All of a sudden, they were going on the road and making 10 times what they made before the record came out. They got royalty payments that they probably didn't ever dream of."

Mississippi-born singer James Carter had forgotten about the day in September 1959 when Alan Lomax recorded him singing "Po Lazarus" at the Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman until producers tracked him down in Chicago to present him with a platinum record plaque and a $20,000 royalty check for his performance. The 76-year-old former convict even attended the GRAMMY Awards that night, though he could barely remember recording the song.

In the years that followed, Tyminski recalls that the demographics of Union Station shows began to swing younger than before: more rock T-shirts, more spiked haircuts. He also remembers the rousing applause for the song that George Clooney, as Ulysses Everett McGill, sang into a can in the film's pivotal recording scene.

"From that point forward, that song was in every single show that we did," Tyminski says. "But when you have a song that's been that good to you and that people identify with and they want to hear, shame on you if you're not willing to play that song for the rest of your life."

How 1995 Became A Blockbuster Year For Movie Soundtracks

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A demonstrator holds a sign with the image of Breonna Taylor

A demonstrator holds a sign with the image of Breonna Taylor

Photo: Jason Connolly/AFP via Getty Images

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Artists Honor Breonna Taylor On Her Birthday sayhername-alicia-keys-lizzo-janet-jackson-janelle-mon%C3%A1e-and-more-honor-breonna-taylor

#SayHerName: Alicia Keys, Lizzo, Janet Jackson, Janelle Monáe And More Honor Breonna Taylor On Her Birthday, Demand Justice

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The music and entertainment worlds are speaking out on behalf of Taylor, a Black medical worker who was killed by white police officers in March
John Ochoa
GRAMMYs
Jun 5, 2020 - 3:00 pm

Several artists and entertainers are honoring Breonna Taylor, a Black medical worker who was killed by white police officers in Louisville, Ky., in March, by speaking out on social media and demanding justice for her killing.

On Friday (June 5), which would have been the slain victim's 27th birthday, Alicia Keys, Lizzo, Janet Jackson, Janelle Monáe, Gary Clark, Jr., Yola and several others took to social media to show their support for Taylor, with many sharing resources and links to petitions calling for the arrests of and charges against the police officers involved in her killing; the police officers in question, who have not been arrested or fired or charged with a crime, are currently placed on administrative leave, The New York Times reports.

https://www.instagram.com/p/CBD9aKPA240

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In a video post shared on Instagram, Alicia Keys sang "Happy Birthday," inserting Taylor's first name into the song. In the caption accompanying the post, the singer indicated she would be making "more calls today in honor" of Taylor and encouraged her fans to do the same. She also shared links to resources in support of Taylor's case as well as groups like Black Lives Matter. 

"She should be alive to celebrate! But instead no charges have been issued and no arrests have been made with the officers involved," Keys wrote in the post's caption.

Read: Alicia Keys Pens Touching Poem To Her Son  

Lizzo shared a custom image on her Instagram page that asked for people to call several Kentucky officials, including Gov. Andy Beshear and U.S. Sen. Rand Paul, and demand for the firing of the police officers involved in Taylor's killing; the post also called for the police officers to be charged with manslaughter and negligence. 

"She should be here," Lizzo said of Taylor in the post's caption. "Instead she was murdered by police in what they're calling a 'clerical error'. They barged into her home without knocking and shot her in her sleep. She worked for us during the covid pandemic, she was an innocent civilian. SAY HER NAME. DEMAND JUSTICE ON HER BIRTHDAY. NO ARRESTS HAVE BEEN MADE."

https://www.instagram.com/p/CBDvPmehVuB

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This week, Lizzo, Lady Gaga and Selena Gomez all opened their social media platforms to Black groups in an initiative aimed at amplifying Black voices and pushing conversations about race relations and progress to the fore.

Who Is Breonna Taylor?

Breonna Taylor was killed March 13 when Louisville police executed a no-knock warrant to crash into her apartment by use of a battering ram, according to The New York Times. The police, who were investigating two suspects believed to be "selling drugs out of a house that was far from Ms. Taylor's home," the newspaper writes, fired several shots into Taylor's apartment; she was struck at least eight times. 

The police officers involved in the incident say they fired inside the home after being fired upon first by Taylor's boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, who was subsequently charged with attempted murder of a police officer, The New York Times reports; Walker's charges were dropped last month.

While Taylor's killing occurred months ago, tensions surrounding her death, sparked by the lack of arrests of the officers involved, have been rising across Louisville and Kentucky over the past few weeks.

Last month (May 28), seven people were shot while attending a Louisville protest calling for police accountability in Taylor's killing, The New York Times reports. Two days later (May 30), the city's mayor, Greg Fischer, implemented a dusk-to-dawn curfew and called in the National Guard for future protests surrounding Taylor's killing, according to The (Louisville) Courier-Journal. This week (June 1) in Louisville, the police and the National Guard killed local restaurant owner David McAtee when they confronted curfew violators, according to The New York Times.

Last month (May 21), the FBI opened an investigation into Taylor's killing, while the slain victim's mother, Tamika Palmer, filed a lawsuit against the three officers involved in the incident, accusing them of wrongfully causing her daughter's death, The New York Times reports. 

Nationwide Protests And Online Dialogues

Taylor's killing is part of a larger wave of recent killings of several Black U.S. citizens, including George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery and others, which have collectively sparked nationwide protests over the past two weeks. 

These recent incidents have also resurfaced tensions and conversations surrounding racial inequality in dealing with police: Majorities of Black and white adults say Black people are treated less fairly than white people in dealing with police and by the criminal justice system as a whole, according to a 2019 survey conducted by the Pew Research Center.

The ongoing social unrest also comes in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, which is killing black and Latino Americans at disproportionately high rates, according to Vox.

Read: The Music Industry Calls For "Black Out Tuesday" In Response To The Death Of George Floyd

Many people online, however, have pointed out that Taylor's killing has not gained the same national attention when compared to the likes of Floyd and Arbery, which has lead social media users to employ the #SayHerName hashtag to spread awareness of her story over the last week. 

On Thursday (June 4), in a tweet mentioning Taylor's killing, Sen. Kamala Harris wrote, "The officers who murdered Breonna Taylor nearly three months ago still have not been charged. We can't forget about Black women in our quest for justice."

In a recent post on The New York Times' In Her Words newsletter and column, gender reporter Alisha Haridasani Gupta wrote, "The exclusion of Breonna Taylor's name is the latest iteration of a longstanding issue: Black women's experiences of police brutality and their tireless contributions to mass social justice movements have almost always been left out of the picture, receiving far less media or political attention."

Below, see some of the artists, entertainers and celebrities who are honoring Breonna Taylor on her birthday today.

https://twitter.com/Kehlani/status/1268936606666256394

GRAMMYs

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https://twitter.com/JanelleMonae/status/1268954844238209024

🗣keep the same energy for #BreonnaTaylor 🗣DEMAND JUSTICE 🗣THE COPS BELOW KILLED HER IN HER SLEEP AND ARE ROAMING FREE👇🏾👇🏾👇🏾👇🏾👇🏾 https://t.co/UbjKEeD4c6

— Janelle Monáe👽🚆🤖🚀🪐 (@JanelleMonae) June 5, 2020

https://twitter.com/selenagomez/status/1268932193734123520

Breonna Taylor would’ve been 27 years old today. The same age I am. But she was shot 8 times. Please join me in signing this petition and let’s get #JusticeForBreonnaTaylorhttps://t.co/KHAMSRMHuw

— Selena Gomez (@selenagomez) June 5, 2020

https://twitter.com/theestallion/status/1268929856726654982

Today Breonna would’ve been celebrating her 27th birthday but instead she was murdered in her bed by police that are calling it a “clerical error” let’s demand justice for her today and here’s how 👇🏾👇🏾#BreonnaTaylor #BreonnaTaylorBirthday pic.twitter.com/uHZgPxzvKr

— TINA SNOW (@theestallion) June 5, 2020

https://twitter.com/ddlovato/status/1268273306769272835

It’s Breonna Taylor’s birthday this Friday. She was an EMT on the frontlines during corona. Around midnight on March 13th police broke down her door and shot her 8 times, no evidence of a crime was uncovered. #birthdayforbreonna #justiceforbreonnataylor

- Demi pic.twitter.com/CQf55XwFtd

— Demi Lovato (@ddlovato) June 3, 2020

Houston Rappers Talk George Floyd's Musical & Community Legacy

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Some of the content on this site expresses viewpoints and opinions that are not those of the Recording Academy and its Affiliates. Responsibility for the accuracy of information provided in stories not written by or specifically prepared for the Academy and its Affiliates lies with the story's original source or writer. Content on this site does not reflect an endorsement or recommendation of any artist or music by the Recording Academy and its Affiliates.