Identity and Politics in the Songs of Contemporary African American Women Ellerine Diengdoh

The domain of folklore studies in general and African American studies in particular, can be enriched by better examination of Black female contributions in the field of music. But this is an area which has been sadly neglected, because scholars have been lax in mining Black womens lyrics for the cultural and gendered values embedded in them. For example, before Angela Y. Daviss Blues Legacies and Black Feminism (1998), songs written and performed by black women have seldom been contemplated in a theoretical context. The reason behind this is the belief that any analysis of popular songs lacked scholarly objectivity because songs are emotional, ephemeral, physical and accessible. In recent years however new disciplines like Ethnomusicology and Jazz Studies have witnessed the proliferation of research dedicated to Black music analysis; yet only a few published material in these fields have focused on the songs or lyrics of African American women. The paper is thus an attempt at interpreting the lyrics of Black women and seeks to explore themes concerning self actualisation and the vindication of Black womanhood. The paper will also examine selected prominent themes in the lyrics of the songs composed by Billie Holiday, Nina Simone and Tracy Chapman and also looks at how these women have used music as a vehicle for social activism and cultural autobiography.

Billie Holiday Born on April 7 1915 as Eleanora Fagan, Billie Holiday was gifted with a particular timbre and pathos-filled voice that inspired a generation. Her emotional connection with her songs came from a life of struggle against racism and sexism.

Billie Holidays lyrics are more than mere entertainment, and a cursory study would reveal them as a means for surviving, coping and even perhaps, social uplift. Billie Holiday was born in abject poverty and was raised by a single mother. Holiday dropped out of school in the fifth grade and found a job running errands in a brothel. This was the place she was exposed to blues and jazz for the first time, and she was particularly fascinated with Louis Armstrong and Bessie Smith. Their music helped her escape the poverty and hardship of her early years by inspiring her to dream. She moved to New York in 1928, and began working in small clubs as a singer. Her popularity spread to black and white audiences and her soulful sound played a vital role in the influence of Jazz on Beat Poetry, and writers such as Hettie Jones, Amiri Baraka, Jack Kerouac and Frank OHara all acknowledge the profound influence her music has had on their work. Most biographies on Billie Holiday portray her as sad creature, reminiscent of Griffith's "Tragic Mulatto"1, yet close to half her songs indicate positive emotions. She was also a woman of resilience, courage and hope and the songs that Billie Holiday wrote express a degree of optimism, assertiveness and selfempowerment. Holiday, as her lyrical narratives revealed, was a complex personality with insight, wit and a desire for a better life. Racism was a serious problem for artists during this time and racism had a serious impact on Billie Holidays career. During her tours and radio broadcast with Artie Shaws big band she was frequently forbidden to sit on stage with the rest of the band and some of her radio spots were cancelled. There was an instance when the band had a booking at the Lincoln Hotel in New York City, Holiday was forced to use the freight elevator, so she would not come in contact with the White folks staying and visiting the hotel. Her encounters with racism took a toll on her

spirit, but instead of distancing herself from these issues, she opted to make a stand, so that people knew her intention in matters relating to race: Im as good as a lot of people of all kinds- Im proud Im a Negro (Downbeat, 1947, p.1). While there are no known lyrics written by Billie Holiday that specifically address the issue of race and though she did not write the song Strange Fruit, yet by all accounts it became her song. The song "Strange Fruit" first materialized as a poem entitled Bitter Fruit written by Abel Meeropol, a Jewish school teacher. Meeropol wrote the poem after he saw the photograph of a double lynching which took place in Median, Indiana. He soon put it to music and thought that Billie Holiday was only person who would be able to bring the song to life. The song became one of the first and most important Civil Rights pleas, Abel Meeropol and Billie Holiday used their song as a form of social protest:
Southern trees bear strange fruit, Blood on the leaves and blood at the root, Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze, Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.

Pastoral scene of the gallant south, The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth, Scent of magnolias, sweet and fresh, Then the sudden smell of burning flesh.

Here is fruit for the crows to pluck, For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck, For the sun to rot, for the trees to drop, Here is a strange and bitter crop.

The lyrics had an overwhelming impact on Billie Holiday, sometimes causing her physical illness during the performance of it. Billie Holiday had this to say about the significance of the song: It means when the crackers are killing the niggers. It means when they take a little nigger like you and snatch off his nuts and shove them down his goddam throat. Thats what it means. (Angelou,1981,cited in Gourse, 1997, p.173). At a time when political protest was not often articulated in musical form, the song portrays lynching in all its cruelty. The three succinct verses are all the more powerful because the language that is used is understated irony. The juxtaposition of a beautiful landscape with the scene of lynching, the smell of magnolias with that of burning flesh, the blossoms typically associated with the Southern climate have now manifested themselves in the form of a strange fruit produced by racial oppressionthis imagery conjures up the essence of racist reaction. Racism in America stands indicted and exposed by these lines, with no need at all for a more moralistic or confrontational message. The song was more powerful than any other song in mainstream America at that time. It was the first time any artist had the courage to use music to stand up against a terrifying social and political institution. It thus became the first African American protest song that set the direction for future protest songs and begins the line into which Nina Simone and Tracy Chapman follow. End Notes
1 As seen in D.W. Griffiths 1915 film The Birth of a Nation, The Tragic Mulatto was a woman of mixed-race marriage or sexual union. She invariably died at the end of her story, as punishment for her sin of being mixed race.

Nina Simone

Eunice Kathleen Waymon was born in Tryon, North Carolina on February 21, 1933 and Eunice Waymon never intended to become Nina Simone, the protest singer and social activist. She and her mother had in fact envisioned that she would become the first black concert pianist. As a child, Simone revealed an early inclination for music, as she recalls an incident in her early life when her mother was so surprised she almost died on the spot as she witnessed her two -and-a-half year old daughter sitting at the piano playing her favourite hymns God Be With You Till we Meet Again in the key of F.1 Young Nina Simones exceptional piano playing earned her praise throughout the black community and with the white locals as well including her mothers employer, Miss Miller who offered to pay Simones piano tuition fee for a year. But Nina Simones rude racial awakening came early on when she was turned down by Philadelphias prestigious Institute of Music and wondered if race was responsible for her failure to gain acceptance there. Gradually she began to see her life within the context of the Jim Crow South and the harsh reality of being black in America. As Nina Simones political consciousness grew and she abandoned her usual formal performance attire for an exquisitely braided coifs and an afro coupled with head wraps and caftans. There was a marked change in her music as well she developed from singing jazz standards and love and folk ballads to protest music. Nina Simone became one of the most outspoken and prominent musician throughout the civil rights movement. Her music spoke to the hundreds of thousands of African American men and women fighting for their rights during the 1960s as she sang out against racial oppression, and gave voice to the American apartheid.

Her most politically overt song Mississippi Goddam was written in response to the assassination of Medgar Evers and the church bombing that resulted in the deaths of four little black children in Birmingham. Simone explains how she took her first conscious step toward becoming a political artist, It was my first civil rights song, and it erupted out of me quicker than I could write it down. 2 I knew then that I would dedicate myself to the struggle for black justice, freedom and equality under the law for as long as it took, until all our battles were won1 Impelled by extreme rage at the loss of innocent life to Jim Crow racism, Nina Simone penned the provocative and irreverently titled Mississippi Goddam. The song expresses the feeling shared by many Black Americans, who in Fanny Lou Hamers famous words were sick and tired of being sick and tired. 3 Simone echoes this sentiment in the chorus,
Alabamas gotten me so upset Tennessee made me lose my rest And everybody knows about Mississippi Goddam.

While 1963s Mississippi Goddam! is a bold and direct statement against the repression of black peoples freedom, Four Women illustrates the existing outcome of slavery, especially on black women. Simone uses a narrative approach where she uses black women to tell their stories in four distinct stanzas, exhibiting her familiarity with the African oral tradition where storytelling is an essential part of culture. In general Four Women explores recurring themes that have been central to Black womens narratives, including the pursuit for subjectivity and emancipation from both racist and sexist domination. In this song Simone sings of four Black women whose experiences illustrate controlling images and well-worn stereotypes concerning Black women. The

predominant stereotypes categorize Black women as being one or more of the following; mammies4, matriarchs5, coons6, toms7, tragic mulattoes, exotics and angry bitches with the politics of hair, colour and class as defining factors. In her autobiography Simone says this about the song:
The women in the song are black, but their skin tones range from light to dark and their ideas of beauty and their own importance are deeply influenced by that. All the song did was tell what entered the minds of most black women in America when they thought about themselves; their complexions, their hairstraight, kinky, natural which?and what other women thought of them.8

The writer Joel Siegel described Four Women as brief, incisive portraits reflecting the experiences and generational perspectives of a variegated quartet of black women.9 The stories unfold as follows:
My skin is black, my arms are long My hair is woolly, my back is strong Strong enough to take the pain, inflicted again and again What do they call me? My name is Aunt Sarah My skin is yellow, my hair is long Between two worlds I do belong But my father was rich and white He forced my mother late one night And what do they call me? My name is Saffronia My skin is tan, my hair fine My hips invite you, my mouth like wine Whose little girl am I? Anyone who has money to buy What do they call me? My name is Sweet Thing

My skin is brown, my manner is tough I'll kill the first mother I see, my life has been rough I'm awfully bitter these days, because my parents were slaves What do they call me? My name is Peaches

Each womans narrative features the horrors of slavery, torture as seen in Aunt Sarahs whippings on the back, rape which eventually produced an isolated Saffronia, the commoditisation of the black female body and the myth of Black female licentiousness exemplified by Sweet Things prostitution and finally anger which is apparent in Peaches vengeance and righteous fury. While the song is invariably a song of protest and an act of defiance against Americas historical portrayal of Black women, it is eventually an appeal to Black women to reclaim themselves on their own terms and carry the cultural memory of slavery. Only then can the shackles of mental slavery be broken and Black women can move beyond these particularly negative stereotypes. End Notes
1

I Put A Spell On You: The Autobiography of Nina Simone. Nina Simone, Stephen Cleary. New York: De

Capo Press, 1991.

2

What the Music Said: Black Popular Music and Black Public Culture. Mark Anthony Neal. United Kingdom: Routledge, 1999. For biographical material on Fannie Lou Hamer, see Cha Kai Lees For Freedoms Sake: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1999) and Kay Mills This Little Light of Mine: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer (New York: Dutton, 1993).
3

As seen in D.W. Griffiths 1915 film The Birth of a Nation, Mammy is an overweight black As seen in D.W. Griffiths 1915 film The Birth of a Nation, while Mammy is considered to

woman who took care of the white masters children, without concern for her own.
5

exemplify the maternal figure in white homes, Matriarchs exemplify the maternal figure in black homes
6

As seen in D.W. Griffiths 1915 film The Birth of a Nation, The ineffectual and lazy Coon

stereotype was a foolish simpleton who would do anything to avoid work.

As seen in D.W. Griffiths 1915 film The Birth of a Nation, female Toms are presented as

devoted servants totally absorbed in the lives of their masters and not caring for their own.
8

Same as1 Nina Simone: Break Down & Let It All Out. Sylvia Hampton, David Nathan. London : Sanctuary, 2004.

Tracy Chapman Tracy Chapman was brought up in a harsh, poverty-stricken Black neighbourhood in Cleveland, Ohio. Being a bright student, she was awarded a scholarship to Wooster School, Danbury, Connecticut through President Kennedys ABC fund for the disadvantaged. In 1982 she graduated and went on to attend Tufts University in Boston where she majored in Anthropology. Chapmans personal experience of poverty, racial discrimination and humiliation coupled with insights gained from a university education, moulded her into a socially conscious musician. Tracy Chapman appeared in the 80s and recreated the image of an artist isolated from the sexual imagery associated with music video entertainers popular in this era. Normally dressed in turtlenecks, sweaters and blue jeans with her trademark dreadlocks, she carries on the tradition charted by Nina Simone, to be an artist and a composer that addresses the plight of the folk beyond the margins. Tracy Chapmans self-titled debut album is a powerful social commentary which draws attention to a country steeped in racial discrimination. As a dispassionate observer from the sidelines who bears witness to anomalies and atrocities which take place, she wishes to escape but is held back by havi ng mountains o nothing at birth.

Mountains O Things is a satire of the American Dream during the Regan years, where rampant materialism and greed (as seen in flourishing of big businesses) has created a growing chasm between the haves and the have nots. The narrator in the song is a daydreamer, who aspires to attain a life of ease that comes with being rich, but who eventually finds herself caught in a perpetual cycle of labour, serving to enrich the wealthy and established instead.
The life I've always wanted I guess I'll never have I'll be working for somebody else Until I'm in my grave I'll be dreaming of a live of ease And mountains Oh mountains o' things

In most of her songs Chapman endeavours to bring to light the predicament of the invisible poor and the suffering of the minority, but apart from these issues she also addresses the silences surrounding womens oppression such as domestic violence. Rock scholar Ray Pratt situates Behind the Wall as the first song on any popular album..that deals with violence against women1
Last night I heard the screaming Loud voices behind the wall Another sleepless night for me It won't do no good to call The police Always come late If they come at all

Chapman liberates herself from the silencing [that] occurs when Black women are restrained from confronting racism, sexism and elitism in public [discourse].2 Chapman speaks from a place that knows and sees, and in turn articulates on behalf of the increasing disenfranchised and dispossessed

Americans. Her observations are documentation of the oppressive Reagan years and the growing consequences of capitalism. While rallying out against the oppressive political machinery that threatened to engulf the poor and downtrodden, Tracy Chapman uses the motif of flight as an act of resistance. Flight is a recurrent image in..African American songs...a symbolic opportunity for oppressed slaves to free themselves from the shackles of slavery...3 From these circumstances came about the belief in Flying Africans, which have been thematically used throughout the Black literary tradition. Virginia Hamilton further explains the motif and its pervasiveness in the black folk belief,
There are numerous accounts of flying Africans and flying slaves in the Black folktale literature. Such accounts are often combined with tales of slaves disappearing. A plausible explanation might be the slaves running away from slavery.Another explanation is the wishfulfillment motif, a detailed fantasy tale of suffering, of magic power exerted against the so-called master, it was first told and retold by those who had only imaginations to set them free.4

Two suggestions are offered by Hamilton to demystify the myth of the Flying Africans, the first is that of mobility and action, the other imaginative but still resistive. In the song Shes Got Her Ticket, a woman, perhaps Chapman in this case, is flying away from the urban ghetto, which stifles the development and potential of all young and talented Black children. Angela .Y. Davis explains the significance of such a theme for women especially, the ability to travel implied a measure of autonomy, an ability to shun passivity and acquiescence in the face of

mistreatment and injustice and to exercise some control over the circumstances of their lives...5 The song begins with the image of a woman who is determined to flee, but the womans desired destination is left unknown:
Shes got her ticket I think she gonna use it I think she going to fly away No one should try and stop her Persuade her with their power She says that her mind is made Up

This flight to suburban community poses challenges for this young woman:
Young girl aint got no chances No roots to keep her strong Shes shed all pretenses That someday shell belong Some folks call her a runaway A failure in the race But she knows where her ticket takes her She will find her place in the sun

As evident in the above stanza, the flight has broken the strong communal ties she once shared with her people and left a void. Having been uprooted from her community, she no longer has support she needs and people are quick to condemn her calling her A failure in the race as she goes against the prevailing norms of respectability. The song does not end in a bleak note; the woman knows where her ticket will take her to find her place in the sun.

Whether one takes the connotation of flight literally or symbolically, Chapman as a liberated decolonized, radical Black female has found her place in the sun. Her untiring commitment to social change does not end with her songs, for she continues to campaign against oppression and actively engages in activist and humanitarian causes. End Notes
1

Rhythm and Resistance: Explorations in the Political Uses of Popular Music. Ray Pratt. United States: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994.
2

Fighting Back Words: Black Women and the Search for Justice. Patricia Hill Collins. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1948.
3

Embodied voices: Representing Female Vocality in Western Culture. Leslie.C.Dunn. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
4

The People Could Fly: The Picture Book . Virginia Hamilton. New York: Knopf, 1993. Blues Legacy and Black Feminism . Angela.Y.Davis. New York City: Pantheon Books, 1998.

Works Cited
Clarke, Donald. Billie Holiday: Wishing on the Moon. New York: Da Capo Press, 2002.
Collins, Patricia Hill. Fighting Back Words: Black Women and the Search for Justice. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1948.

Dunn, C. Leslie. Embodied voices: Representing Female Vocality in Western Culture. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
Davis, Angela Y. Blues Legacy and Black Feminism . New York City: Pantheon Books, 1998. Greene, Meg. Billie Holiday: A Biography. West Port, USA: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2007. Hill-Radford, Sheila. Further to Fly: Black Women and the Politics of Empowerment. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. Hamilton Virginia. The People Could Fly: The Picture Book . New York: Knopf, 1993.

---. The People Could Fly: African Black Folktales. New York: Alfred Knopf, 1985.

Hampton, Sylvia, Nathan David . Nina Simone: Break Down & Let It All Out. London : Sanctuary, 2004. Neal, Mark Anthony. What the Music Said: Black Popular Music and Black Public Culture. United Kingdom: Routledge, 1999. Pratt, Ray. Rhythm and Resistance: Explorations in the Political Uses of Popular Music. United States: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994.

Simmon, Scott. The Films of D.W. Griffith. Cambridge, UK.: University of Cambridge Press, 1993.
Simone, Nina and Cleary Stephen. I Put A Spell On You: The Autobiography of Nina Simone. New York : De Capo Press, 1991. Whitely, Sheila. Women and popular music: Sexuality, Identity, and Subjectivity. London : Routledge, 2000. ---. Sexing the Groove: Popular Music and Gender. London and New York : Routledge, 1997. Griffin, Farah Jasmine. If You Cant Be Free, Be a Mystery. New York : The Free Press, 2001.

Selected Discography
Chapman, Tracy. Tracy Chapman. Electra/Wea, 1988. ---. Crossroads. Electra/Wea, 1989. Holiday, Billie. Lady in Satin. Columbia, 1958. Holiday, Billie. All or Nothing at All. Verve, 1959. Holiday, Billie. Strange Fruit. Billie Holiday.Commodore, 2000. Simone, Nina. Folksy Nina. Colpix, 1964. ---. Mississippi Goddam. Nina Simone in Concert.Philips,1964. ---. Four Women. Wild is the Wind. Philips,1966. ---. Nina Sings the Blues. RCA, 1967.