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Posts tagged as “Ben Vereen”

#AAMAM: “The Great Black Way” – Celebrating African Americans on Broadway (LISTEN)

by Teddy Tenenbaum (@teddyt)

We talk about how African Americans invented rock and roll. We talk about the great musicians Scott Joplin and W.C. Handy, the giant of ragtime and the “Father of the Blues.” Before rock and roll was a gleam in Chuck Berry’s mother’s eye, Jazz was the great American music form, a creation of Black artists.

And of course, rap and R&B rule the Billboard charts in the 21st century. And a century before Lil Nas X reimagined country music, the genre was born with the help of the banjo, a descendent of the West African lute brought to America by Africans who were enslaved, and with inspiration from early forms of Black music, such as spirituals and “field tunes.”

But there’s one more great American musical tradition, one where the contributions of Black people is sometimes forgotten, often under-appreciated. Maybe it shouldn’t surprise us that African Americans are often ignored when the discussion turns to the history of the Broadway musical, when Broadway itself is known as the “Great White Way.”

Broadway has never been an easy world for an outsider to break in, even when that outsider is White, wealthy, and part of the New York establishment. Mounting a Broadway show costs a small fortune, and there’s no cheap or easy way to distribute it. It’s a medium for people with powerful connections or large assets.

But African-American artists have made a tremendous impact, primarily as writers and performers, but also as creators of source material for Broadway shows and music. I don’t profess to be a historian of Broadway or African-American music, but I will do my best to take you on a fan’s journey through the long, storied history of African Americans and Broadway.

Savion Glover in “Bring In ‘Da Noise, Bring in ‘Da Funk”

To limit the scope a bit, this playlist is focused on Broadway shows only, ignoring the contributions made to Hollywood musicals, Off-Broadway, regional theater and West End theater in London. And even though I could add another hundred amazing cuts (thanks to Hamilton, Dreamgirls, Jelly’s Last Jam, etc.), I’ve limited the playlist to one crucial number from each show… with two notable exceptions (and for good reason).

These liner notes contain a short intro for every cut, but you don’t need them to enjoy the music. So without further ado, curtains up on the historic African-American tradition on Broadway, aka the Great Black Way.

Personal note: This playlist is dedicated to Good Black News’ Lori Lakin Hutcherson (who suggested and inspired it, and who has always inspired me), and musicologist Chris Molanphy, whose Slate columns on music and podcast Hit Parade feed the hungry amateur music historian in me.

  1. “I’m Just Wild About Harry” (1921)

Even though Shuffle Along was not the first Broadway musical featuring a Black cast in a Broadway theater (that distinction belongs to In Dahomey in 1903), it was the first Broadway musical written, composed and performed entirely by Black artists. Previous to the opening of Shuffle Along, there hadn’t been a successful “Black musical” on Broadway in 12 years, which made it particularly hard to mount the production. (Not to mention the fact that just a couple of decades before, African-Americans were prohibited from performing for White audiences, unless in – believe it or not – blackface). But Black vaudevillians Flournoy Miller and Aubrey Lyles teamed with Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle (who wrote the music and lyrics) and put every nickel they could find into creating this musical comedy. It paid off; Shuffle Along was a huge success. Shuffle Along deserves note for a few other reasons. It was the first production where a White audience witnessed two Black people on stage romancing and touching each other. It also helped launch the careers of two legends – Paul Robeson and Josephine Baker.    

  1. Ol’ Man River” (1927)

Six years before Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II wrote Showboat, a musical about a Mississippi River showboat, Paul Robeson was making his powerful baritone heard in Shuffle Along. His star only grew from there, and Hammerstein and Kern specifically wrote the crucial Showboat role of Joe for Robeson. Sadly, he wasn’t available for the original production, but took over the role in the 1932 revival and the film adaptation. Because one can’t think of Ol’ Man River without thinking of Robeson, his is the version I’ve included on this playlist. When Hammerstein and Kern adapted the Edna Ferber novel that among other things deals with prejudice in the South, they changed Broadway forever. It is generally considered the first successful musical to bring a serious topic to the genre, which was a revelation after years of vaudeville, revues, and musical comedies. It was also the first well-known racially integrated musical and the first musical to deal with the issue of interracial marriage. And it also has its share of controversy due to the stereotypical use of vernacular and its outdated stereotypes. But it was another milestone for African-Americans on Broadway.

  1. “Summertime” (1935)

So much has been written about Porgy and Bess and its treatment of African-American characters, both bad and good. Porgy and Bess has its detractors and supporters. It is a troubling artifact of American culture’s history of the depiction of African Americans. But no one can deny the impact the show has had on American pop culture. In fact, “Summertime” is one of the most covered songs in history (over 25,000 times)! Which is why, instead of featuring the original version, I decided to include one of the most famous covers, by Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong. This is also to make the point that just as Broadway has used African-American artists, African-American artists have used Broadway music to great advantage. In fact, Louis Armstrong makes one more appearance on this playlist, in a similar historical role.

TV REVIEW: "Roots", airing Memorial Day on History Channel, A&E and Lifetime, Resonates in a Black Lives Matter Era

Malachi Kirby, center, as Kunta Kinte in “Roots.” (Credit: Casey Crafford/A+E Networks)

article by James Poniewozik via nytimes.com

The original mini-series “Roots” was about history, and it was history itself. Airing on ABC in January 1977, this generational saga of slavery was a kind of answer song to the 1976 Bicentennial celebration of the (white, often slave-owning) founding fathers. It reopened the books and wrote slaves and their descendants into the national narrative.

But as an event, it was also a chapter in that story. It shaped and was shaped by the racial consciousness of its era. It was a prime-time national reckoning for more than 100 million viewers. As a television drama, it was excellent. But as a television broadcast, it was epochal.

The four-night, eight-hour remake of “Roots,” beginning Memorial Day on History, A&E and Lifetime, is largely the same story, compressed in some places and expanded in others, with a lavish production and strong performances. It is every bit as worthy of attention and conversation. But it is also landing, inevitably, in a very different time.

Viewers who watched “Roots” four decades ago have since lived with racial narratives of moving forward and stepping back. They’ve seen America’s first black president elected and a presidential candidate hesitate to disavow the Ku Klux Klan.

So in timing and spirit, this is a Black Lives Matter “Roots,” optimistic in focusing on its characters’ strength, sober in recognizing that we may never stop needing reminders of whose lives matter.

The first new episode, much of it shot in South Africa, looks stunning, another sign of the cultural times. Kunta Kinte (Malachi Kirby, in the role made famous by LeVar Burton) is now not a humble villager but the scion of an important clan, and his home — Juffure, in Gambia — a prosperous settlement. Kunta is captured by a rival family and sold into slavery to a Virginian (James Purefoy), by way of a harrowing Middle Passage.

Mr. Kirby’s Kunta is a more regal and immediately defiant character than Mr. Burton’s. But his tragedy is the same: He rebels but fails and is beaten into accepting his slave name, Toby. The name — the loss of identity — is as much a weapon as the whip. As the overseer who beats him puts it: “You can’t buy a slave. You have to make a slave.”

Kunta stops running, but he preserves his traditions, including the practice of presenting a newborn baby to the night sky with the words, “Behold, the only thing that is greater than you.”

That theme of belonging to something larger, of the ancestral family as a character in itself, is essential to “Roots.” Although Alex Haley fictionalized the events of his novel on which the mini-series is based, his story offered black Americans what slavery was machine-tooled to erase: places, dates, names, memories. And that focus keeps the ugliness — the racial slurs, the gruesome violence — from rendering this series without hope. A person may live and die in this system, but a people can survive it.

Still, the individual stories remain heartbreaking, even in small moments, as when the slave musician Fiddler (a soulful Forest Whitaker) recognizes a Mandinka tune he overhears Kunta singing. He’s moved — and, it seems, a little frightened by what the recognition stirs in him. As much as he’s worked to efface his heritage as a survival strategy, it lingers, a few notes haunting the outskirts of his memory.

Kunta’s daughter, Kizzy (E’myri Lee Crutchfield as a child, Anika Noni Rose as an adult), is teased with the possibility of a better life; she grows up friends with the master’s daughter and learns to read. But she’s sold to Tom Lea (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), a struggling farmer who rapes and impregnates her. Rape — there are several assaults in this series — is another weapon against identity, another way you make a slave. Ms. Rose burns with Kizzy’s determination to hang on to her sense of self.