Reporters Ask Sidney Poitier His Views on Race (1968)

 

 

Al Green | “To Sir with Love” | Truth n' Time

"To Sir With Love" by Al Green, from the album Truth N' Time (1978)

Remembering Sidney Poitier

The legendary soul singer Al Green performs his version of “To Sir with Love” the theme song to the movie featuring the late great Sidney Poitier. Truth N' Time was recorded at Green's American Music studio. Green produced the album.

“To Sir with Love”

• ​Personnel
• Al Green - vocals, lead and rhythm guitar, arrangements
• Bernard Staton, James Bass - guitar
• Brian Batie, Errol Thomas, James Turner - bass
• Fred Jordan, Gary Lax, Jesse Butler, Johnny Brown, Purvis Leon Thomas, Charles Renard Webb - keyboards
• John Toney - drums, percussion
• Ron Echols - tenor and baritone saxophone
• Buddy Jarrett - alto saxophone
• Darryl Neely, Fred Jordan - trumpet Buddy Jarrett, Harvey Jones, Linda Jones - backing vocals
• Fred Jordan - engineer
• Kinji Nishimura - photography

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A Green at the Midnight Special - 1974

 

Wilt Chamberlain at the funeral of Martin Luther King. 1968.

 

Barbara Lynn - You'll Lose A Good Thing (The Beat, 1966)

 

Singer/guitarist Barbara Lynn was a rare commodity during her heyday. Not only was she a female instrumentalist (one of the very first to hit the charts), but she also played left-handed -- quite well at that -- and even wrote some of her own material. Lynn's music often straddled the line between blues and Southern R&B, and since much of her early work -- including the number one R&B hit "You'll Lose a Good Thing" -- was recorded in New Orleans, it bore the sonic imprint of the Crescent City. Lynn was born Barbara Lynn Ozen in Beaumont, TX, on January 16, 1942; she played the piano as a child before switching to guitar, inspired by Elvis Presley. In junior high, Lynn formed her own band, Bobbie Lynn and the Idols; at this point, her musical role models veered between bluesmen (Guitar Slim, Jimmy Reed) and female pop singers (Brenda Lee, Connie Francis). After winning a few talent shows and playing some teen dances, the still-underage Lynn started working the local clubs and juke joints, risking getting kicked out of school if she had been discovered. Singer Joe Barry caught her live act and recommended her to his friend, producer/impresario Huey P. Meaux, aka the Crazy Cajun.

With her parents' consent, Meaux brought Lynn to New Orleans to record at the legendary Cosimo's studio. Lynn cut a few singles for the Jamie label with the understanding that if none hit, she was to attend college instead of pursuing music right off the bat. In 1962, her self-penned ballad "You'll Lose a Good Thing" became a national hit, reaching the pop Top Ten and climbing all the way to number one on the R&B charts. Her first album (of the same name) was also released that year, featuring ten of her originals among its 12 tracks. Lynn continued to record for Jamie up through 1965, producing follow-up R&B hits like "You're Gonna Need Me" and "Oh Baby (We Got a Good Thing Goin')," the latter of which was recorded by the Rolling Stones in 1965. In 1966, Lynn switched over to Meaux's Tribe label and cut "You Left the Water Running," which became something of an R&B standard and was covered by the likes of Otis Redding. In 1967, she signed with Atlantic and had another R&B hit with "This Is the Thanks I Get" early the following year; she also issued another album, Here Is Barbara Lynn, in 1968. Lynn scored one last hit for Atlantic in 1972's "(Until Then) I'll Suffer," but by this point, she had several children to worry about raising; dissatisfied with her promotion anyway, she wound up effectively retiring from the music business for most of the '70s and '80s, though she did play the occasional low-key tour.

Lynn returned to music in the mid-'80s, touring Japan for the first time in 1984; she later cut a live album there, called You Don't Have to Go, which was eventually issued in the States by Ichiban. Lynn had managed to retain a cult following among connoisseurs of American soul and blues in several different pockets of the world, and toured internationally during the early '90s. In 1994, Bullseye Blues issued her first full-fledged studio album in over two decades, So Good; Until Then I'll Suffer followed in 1996. Lynn later caught on with the respected blues label Antone's, and in 2000 she cut Hot Night Tonight, which featured a couple of raps by her son Bachelor Wise. ~ Steve Huey, All Music Guide

PLEASE NOTE: I divided my uploads among multiple channels, Bookmark this link in your browser for instant access to an index with links to all of John1948's oldies classics. LINK: http://john1948.wikifoundry.com/page/...

Grandma & granddaughter will graduate from TSU together

 

“I never contemplated this,” Theresa said. “Who new that when I started back then that I would be graduating at the same time as she did. Nobody but God.”

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Black Stalin More Come

 

Produced by Randy Yearwood for his good friend Black Stalin.

This song tells of the strength of the South African spirit and their relentless fight against colonialism and Apartheid from the early days to more contemporary times.

Photo shoot "A Great Day In Harlem", 12 August 1958

Photographer Art Kane took the most wonderful photograph in jazz history – remarkable for many reasons. In features 57 of the best jazz musicians and the image has come to be called, ‘A Great Day In Harlem’. Of the 57 musicians featured only two remain alive – SONNY ROLLINS and BENNY GOLSON

19 year old Aretha Franklin with dancer Charles Cholly Atkins

A rare shot of a 19 year old Aretha Franklin with dancer Charles Cholly Atkins - who worked with Motown records to groom their artists.

Famous photo of the REV. GARY DAVIS playing a 12 string guitar, and little girl

Famous photo of the REV. GARY DAVIS playing a 12 string guitar, and little girl (who is Meegan Ochs, daughter of Phil Ochs, the photo is by Alice Skinner Ochs, Meegan's mother), dancing. The Reverend was an iconic guitar master with a totally singular style that incorporated blues, ragtime, marches and his own stunning gospel compositions. He was born in South Carolina and in his later years lived in Harlem in New York City. His is a remarkable story. He made his living mostly as a street singer and storefront preacher. His first handful of recordings, in 1935, were on a National, with astounding blazing guitar playing and rough singing as Blind Gary. By the 1950s and '60s he also became known as a teacher, and he influenced as well as taught directly, dozens of seminal guitarists such as Stefan Grossman, Woody Mann, Roy Book Binder, Rory Block, Ernie Hawkins, Andy Cohen, David Bromberg, Bob Weir, Jorma Kaukonen and many, many more. He had a complex, driving, seemingly limitless ability and reinvented the guitar in a profound way. "Samson and Delilah (If I Had My Way)," "You Got to Move," "Sit Down on The Banks of The River," "Candyman," and "Cocaine Blues," are just some of the monumental pieces from his vast repertoire. An essential artist, part of my musical DNA.

WORLD'S #1 SOURCE of new Nationals, Fairbanks, Scheerhorns: www.catfishkeith.com/national-guitars/

For more about the Rev, check out the documentary HARLEM STREET SINGER, the books SAY NO TO THE DEVIL and OH, WHAT A BEAUTIFUL CITY.
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— with Penny Cahill and 2 others.

The ingenuity of Black folks

 

The James Mtume Interviews - "The Glorification of Mediocrity"

 

Sonically Lazy

by Mtume

...​I don’t put down hip hop. I think it was a very creative thing, because for the young black kids, music was taken out of the schools. When was the last time anybody’s seen a music store in a black neighborhood? Maybe thirty years ago. You go to Harlem, and there are no music stores. It was the genius of desperation that brought about sampling. It also kept the DNA of Funk and RnB alive for kids who never really heard them. It’s gotten to the point now where a lot of the cats are playing with a band, and I find that terribly interesting.

​We have to go back to the period when hip hop was starting. There was a great social divide in the black community between the older blacks and younger blacks, especially black men.

​Many in my generation denigrated hip hop and rap. But each generation brings its own music. That divide gave a lot of anger to the hip hop artists, who felt they weren’t getting respect. If you have no youth and all old people, your glass is half empty. All youth with no age, your glass is half full.

​We have become sonically lazy. The only cat who ever broke out of the box was Sun Ra. The rest of us, I don’t care what avenue we take, we’re still in that box....

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James Mtume, jazz and funk musician, dies aged 75

Jazz, R&B and ‘sophistifunk’: James Mtume’s greatest recordings

From his Afrocentric jazz with Miles Davis and Lonnie Liston Smith to his chart hits for Roberta Flack and Stephanie Mills, we celebrate the best of the late musician

Mtume – Juicy Fruit (1983)

Mtume didn’t endear himself much to the burgeoning hip-hop scene by lodly demanding in the late 80s that artists who were sampled got paid, but that didnu’t seem to stop people actually sampling him: at the last count, Mtume’s biggest hit – a ballad that stripped his sound back to little more than a drum machine, a synth, a scattering of guitar and some dubby echo – has been borrowed over 100 times, by everyone from Stetsasonic to Jennifer Lopez, but most famously on the Notorious BIG’s 1994 smash Juicy. Wrigley attempted to sue over the title, before Mtume explained to their lawyers the song had nothing to do with chewing gum – “it’s about oral sex” – an experience he later described as “one of the highlights of my life”.

Miles Davis – Mtume (1974)

Mtume first came to prominence as percussionist in Miles Davis’ early 70s band, which was still causing controversy decades later – for years, it seemed no Davis documentary was complete without someone, usually critic Stanley Crouch, decrying them as either a cluttered noise or a craven capitulation to commercial forces. It has to be said, there exist more obviously craven capitulations to commercial forces than the music on 1974’s incredible Get Up With It, an album Mtume is all over. Listen to his congas fluttering, as one writer put it, “like bats” during the stunning, subdued, ambient-inspiring Duke Ellington tribute He Loved Him Madly – but let’s go with the track named in his honour, which Mtume powers along.

Roberta Flack & Donny Hathaway – Back Together Again (1980)

Recruited for Roberta Flack’s band, Mtume made it his business to reignite the singer’s relationship with troubled duet partner Donny Hathaway, encouraging them to record his ballad The Closer I Get to You together. A huge hit in 1978, it paved the way for an album-length follow-up to 1972’s Roberta Flack & Donny Hathaway, but Hathaway’s erratic behaviour caused Mtume to temporarily abandon the sessions: hours after taping his vocal on Back Together Again, Hathaway returned to his hotel and killed himself. It seems extraordinary that such a transcendent, life-affirming piece of music could have emerged from such desperate circumstances, but Back Together Again is 10 minutes of euphoric disco glee.

Stephanie Mills – Never Knew Love Like This Before (1980)

As the 70s turned into the 80s, Mtume and songwriting/production partner Reggie Lucas – another former Miles Davis alumnus – transformed singer Stephanie Mills from a Broadway star, who spent five years in the cast of The Wiz, into an R&B chart regular. The four albums they made with her are packed with highlights – What Cha Gonna Do With My Lovin’, Starlight, Two Hearts – but the commercial peak was the Grammy-winning Never Knew Love Like This Before: pillow-soft, lushly orchestrated mid-tempo disco, inspired by the birth of Lucas’ first child. A few years back it was used, to heartbreaking effect, in the second series of Pose.

Phyllis Hyman – You Know How to Love Me (1981)

Before hooking up with Mtume and Lucas, Phyllis Hyman had worked with a succession of fantastic writers and producers – Skip Scarborough, Earth Wind & Fire’s Philip Bailey and, on her heart-stopping sleaze anthem Loving You Losing You, Thom Bell. But the sound of 1981’s You Know How to Love Me is the definition of what Mtume called his “sophistifunk” style: rhythms aimed at the dancefloor, “pretty melodies”, a hint of jazz still lurking somewhere in the mix. It’s a toss-up as to whether the title track or Under Your Spell is the best thing here, but if the former deserved to be a far bigger hit – which was pretty much the story of the under-appreciated Hyman’s career – it nevertheless rightly became one of her signature songs.

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Relevant content

• The James Mtume Interviews

To Sir With Love - Royal Bahamas Defence Force pays tribute to Sir Sidney Poitier

The Royal Bahamas Defence Force Band performs a rendition of To Sir With Love as A tribute to a Bahamian icon, Sir Sidney Poitier on his 92nd Birthday

The video production is set to the theme song of the British film bearing the same title, To Sir With Love, in which Sir Sidney played the leading role. The song was also released the same year as the film in 1967, and was sung by Scottish singer and actress, Lulu Kennedy-Cairns. A recipient of the Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) award, Lulu starred alongside Sir Sidney in the movie. The song and movie became a number 1 hit that year on US charts.

Distributed by Columbia Pictures, the film featured Sir Sidney as a black educator from British Guiana (now Republic of Guyana), who took a teaching job at a high school in the rough East End district of London. At the school, the students addressed their teacher as, ‘Sir,’ almost a decade before Sir Sidney was actually knighted by the Queen of England.

Against great odds, ‘Sir’ was able to impart a sense of dignity, and social responsibility to a class of defiant, rebellious teenagers. In the end, the students came to love and respect him for the time and effort invested in transforming their lives for the better.

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1964: Sidney Poitier’s Oscars acceptance speech after he became the first Black man to win an Academy Award for Best Actor

 

Belafonte said of his friendship with Poitier: “For over 80 years, Sidney and I laughed, cried and made as much mischief as we could."

He continued in a statement regarding Poitier's death: "He was truly my brother and partner in trying to make this world a little better. He certainly made mine a whole lot better."

Island in the Sun (1957)

Island in the Sun is a 1957 De Luxe in CinemaScope drama film produced by Darryl F. Zanuck and directed by Robert Rossen. It features an ensemble cast including James Mason, Harry Belafonte, Joan Fontaine, Joan Collins, Dorothy Dandridge, Michael Rennie, Stephen Boyd, Patricia Owens, John Justin, Diana Wynyard, John Williams, and Basil Sydney. The film is about race relations and interracial romance set in the fictitious island of Santa Marta. Barbados and Grenada were selected as the sites for the movie based on the 1955 novel by Alec Waugh. The film was controversial at the time of its release for its portrayal of interracial romance.

"Island in the Sun" was made in 1957, a date at which Britain still retained its colonial possessions in Africa and the West Indies, although it was clear that they were moving towards independence. The film traces this process on the fictitious Caribbean island of Santa Marta. The film follows several characters, black, white and mixed race, and their relationships. It also chronicles the social inequality between the British who colonized the island and the majority Black population.

Set during the 1950s on a British-ruled Caribbean island, this drama deals with local politics, interracial relationships, social inequality, racism, adultery, and murder.

The cast is very strong (with Dorothy Dandridge, Joan Fontaine, John Williams and James Mason--who never disappoints,) and the storyline both intriguing and unpredictable. Harry Belafonte portrays a proud, outspoken labor leader who fights racial injustice on a British Caribbean island, but this is only a secondary plot line. The "forbidden fruit" of interracial relationships is explored from several different perspectives giving this movie an important place in the history of American Cinema. Although racism and class-ism are common elements, the characters are empathetically portrayed. This movie was released in Jim Crow America and, younger viewers may not fully appreciate its' unique portrayal of Blacks in non-subservient roles. Blacks were typically cast as inarticulate maids and butlers, but Dorothy Dandridge (nominated as Best Actress for Carmen Jones in 1954) and Harry Belafonte (a top ten pop singer) were particularly stunning and sophisticated, an anomaly for Black actors in films roles at the time.

This was a very unique movie for Hollywood in the 1950s because it explored interracial relationships from both a political as well as romantic perspective. No doubt, it made audiences extremely uncomfortable. As a result of playing interracial love scenes with Harry Belafonte, Joan Fontaine received poison pen mail, including some purported threats from the Ku Klux Klan. Fontaine turned the letters over to the FBI.

The film received mixed reviews and its interracial themes meant it found initial difficulty in being booked in theaters in the Southern United States. The film also received protests prior to its opening in the North in St Paul-Minneapolis. It was banned in Memphis, Tennessee as “too frank a depiction of miscegenation, offensive to moral standards, and no good for either white or Negro.” Zanuck had previously said he would pay the fines of any theatre owners fined for showing the film.

 

A Ship Named “Fair American” Delivered 88 Trafficked Africans into Charleston, South Carolina by the Equal Justice Initiative

 

On this day January 7, 1807   A Ship Named “Fair American” Delivered 88 Trafficked Africans into Charleston, South Carolina On January 7, 1807, a U.S.-registered trafficking vessel delivered 88 kidnapped and enslaved African passengers into Charleston, South Carolina. The ship, named “Fair American,” originally kidnapped 101 Africans from Iles de Los, an island chain off the coast of contemporary Conakry, Guinea, in West Africa. However, nearly 15% of these forced passengers perished on the grueling journey across the Atlantic. The port of Charleston, South Carolina imported more enslaved Africans during the Transatlantic slave trade than any other city in North America—more than one-third of all Africans trafficked in the Transatlantic slave trade into the U.S. were trafficked through Charleston. From its beginnings as a British proprietary colony in 1663, South Carolina entrenched the institution of chattel slavery. South Carolina’s proprietors incentivized enslavers to immigrate, offering 10-20 acres of free land for every enslaved Black person that a white migrant forcibly brought to the colony. By 1720, South Carolina was importing an average of 1,000 enslaved Africans annually. This figure rose to 3,000 by 1770. By the middle of the 18th century, enslaved people made up more than 70% of Charleston’s population. The kidnapping, trafficking, and sale of Africans escalated dramatically in Charleston between 1803 and 1807. Anticipating a constitutional ban on the Transatlantic trade beginning in 1808, traffickers in Charleston imported more than 40,000 kidnapped Africans during these five years alone. The 88 kidnapped Africans trafficked into Charleston on this day in 1807 would be some of the first of more than 21,000 kidnapped Africans who would be brought through Charleston in 1807 alone, accounting for 95% of the total Africans trafficked into the U.S. in 1807. As mortality rates on the "Fair American" illustrate, the Middle Passage subjected kidnapped passengers to brutal, traumatic conditions, with many perishing before reaching North American shores. At least 13% of all kidnapped Africans destined for Charleston during the Transatlantic slave trade died during the Middle Passage. Africans trafficked to Charleston faced equally brutal conditions following disembarkation. Many spent weeks quarantined on Sullivan’s Island in Charleston Harbor, or detained in the city’s warehouses where thousands died awaiting sale at downtown markets. Africans trafficked to South Carolina faced a lifetime of involuntary servitude on labor-intensive rice plantations. Rice required 10 times the labor to produce, when compared to other colonial cash crops. Further, in South Carolina, enslavers had complete discretion over the sentencing and punishment of enslaved people accused of wrongdoing, resulting in brutal physical torture and summary executions. South Carolina’s rice plantations had alarming mortality rates among enslaved people higher than anywhere else in the South—about one third of enslaved Africans who landed in South Carolina died within a year.   Explore the online calendar

Haitian Independence Day

On January 1, 1804, Dessalines declared the nation independent and renamed it Haiti. ... Haiti thus emerged as the first black republic in the world, and the second nation in the western hemisphere (after the United States) to win its independence from a European power.

 

Happy New Year 2022 from Michelle Obama

 

Happy New Year from me and my boo! Wishing you all a year filled with happiness, love, and good health.

Watch Betty White as Janet Jackson's Godmama

Betty White as Janet Jackson’s (Cinderella’s) Funky Godmama on their way to a Stevie Wonder concert on The Jackson’s Show (1977)