#absolutely fascinating how that just completely dominoes their career and life

[tiredassmage]

“More of you already? I suppose I should be flattered.”

[rhondanicole]

Black Music Month: Artists and Albums that Matter to Me

June is #BlackMusicMonth, an annual celebration of African Americans’ innumerable contributions to the American–and global–musical landscape. Each day this month, I’m highlighting some of my favorite artists and albums.

Day 17

Father’s Day

It’s Father’s Day, a day when we’re celebrating dads, daddies, pops, papas, granddads, grandpas, fathers-in-law, step fathers, father figures, and all the men who make up the villages that raised, nurtured, protected, provided for, and loved us. But it’s still Black Music Month, which means today’s even more special as we shine a spotlight on a small and certainly not exhaustive group of musical fathers.

Thomas A. Dorsey, the Father of Gospel Music

Born in Georgia at the end of the 19th century, Thomas A. Dorsey is regarded as the founding father of gospel music. Beginning as a blues pianist, Dorsey blended blues and jazz with traditional Christian praise music to create a new style that began gaining popularity in the early ‘30s. Pulling from ancestral spirituals, call and response, and the moans, yells, and hollers that came to symbolize the Black religious experience in America, Dorsey ushered in a new, modern sound that took churches across the country by storm and laid the foundation for today’s contemporary gospel. His most famous composition, “Precious Lord, Take My Hand,” became the golden standard as performed by Mahalia Jackson.   

WC Handy, the Father of the Blues

Blues music finds its roots deep in African musical and cultural aesthetics, field/work songs, ancestral spirituals, and European folk music. Its popularity began to increase, according to some accounts, following Emancipation, and at the dawn of the 1900s, had established itself as a staple in Black households. WC Handy would come to be one of the most accomplished and esteemed blues composers, and called the Father of the Blues. Handy is best known for harnessing the power of the Delta blues and unleashing it on an international audience through songs like “Beale Street Blues” and “Saint Louis Blues,” the latter of which was recorded in the 1920s by Bessie Smith and Louis Armstrong. 

Scott Joplin and Buddy Bolden, the Fathers of Ragtime and Jazz

Although typically associated with New Orleans, ragtime actually originated in the 19th century in the midwest. Actor and singer Ernest Hogan was among the first Black performers to bring ragtime, which is characterized by syncopated rhythms and shares DNA with cakewalks, folk, and marches, to a wider audience. The style was further popularized by composer Scott Joplin. His song “The Entertainer” is one of the most recognizable ragtime tunes. Joplin’s compositions formed the basis for many other ragtime musicians, and in the early days of jazz, ragtime continued to influence a new cadre of players.

When ragtime made its way to the Crescent City, musicians there began to add their own layers of flavor to the sounds Joplin pioneered. Key among them was Buddy Bolden, a cornet player whose New Orleans band is thought to be the first to incorporate brass instruments into blues compositions, somewhere around 1900. Bolden’s career was relatively short, due to illness, but during his time he cultivated a style that pulled from ragtime, blues, and spirituals, creating the fusion that would come to be known as jazz.

Louis Jordan, the Father of R&B

Rhythm and blues, aka R&B, was coined by record labels in the 1940s as a way to define music intended to be sold to Black audiences. Identifying blues and jazz-based compositions with particularly persistent rhythmic patterns as such, R&B bands typically involved piano, guitar, drums, and bass, and brass and/or woodwinds. Lyrically, R&B focused on relationships, sex, and everyday life. Musician Louis Jordan is credited as being one of the pioneers of R&B, popularizing the sound with tunes like “I’m Gonna Leave You on the Outskirts of Town” and “Five Guys Name Moe.”

James Brown, the Godfather of Soul

Mr. Brown really needs no introduction, but this list of Black musical fathers wouldn’t be complete without the Godfather himself. Soul music mixes R&B, gospel, and rock, and in the 1960s became nearly synonymous with the Black experience in America. Whereas R&B tended to focus on interpersonal relationships and happenings on the home front, soul took a more outward perspective, offering commentary on what was happening in the community and in the world at large. James Brown’s brand of soul music was unapologetically Black and proud, and his complex arrangements and irresistibly danceable jawns would go on to pave the way for funk and hip-hop. 

Fats Domino, Ray Charles, and Chuck Berry, the Fathers of Rock n Roll

Building on blues, gospel, folk, and country, rock n roll’s origins couldn’t be further away from metal hair bands and Seattle grunge. While numerous sub-genres would emerge from rock n roll over the decades, it is absolutely, without a doubt, derived from the Black American musical movement. And although it can’t be attributed to just one musician as its founder, three of the genre’s most influential artists are New Orleans musician Fats Domino; blues, jazz, and soul legend Ray Charles; and the man whose kinetic style of playing brought legions of white teens to fever, Chuck Berry. These musicians, along with Little Richard, Ike Turner, Bo Diddley, and countless others are the ones to whom we owe the deepest gratitude for the attitude that would birth Jimi, Prince, and Lenny, not to mention Living Colour, King’s X, Fishbone, Robert Randolph, Ben Harper, and many, many, many more.  

George Clinton, the Father of Funk

Funk can be somewhat hard to define and yet, when you hear it, you know it. Funk makes your face curl up like you smell something stanky, makes your neck snap back and forth on the downbeat, and is often delivered in the key of E flat minor. Funk is the hybrid of everything that came before, leaning more assertively into the groove--that bass line, them drums. And no one does funk better than the one and only Dr. Funkenstein, George Clinton. To look at Clinton in his signature space age pimp get-ups, with colorful ribbons and yarn dangling from his head and the most outrageous costumes one could barely imagine without adequate amounts of ooo-wee and who knows what else, you’d be hard pressed to believe he started out as a doo-wop singer. That group, The Parliaments, eventually morphed into Parliament and Funkadelic (P-Funk). Stacking Afrofuturism and a fascination with sci-fi on top of R&B, soul, and rock n roll, Clinton fashioned funk that, on the surface, seemed to be mostly about the booty shake, but that also touched on substantive topics.

DJ Kool Herc, the Father of Hip-Hop

Undoubtedly the most influential musical genre to come out of the Black music movement is hip-hop, whose origins are traced precisely to one date, one place, and one person: August 11, 1973, 1520 Sedgwick Ave. in The Bronx, DJ Kool Herc. On that night in that spot, the Jamaican-born deejay introduced a room full of revelers to what would eternally be known as the break, birthing a movement that would, at first, be dismissed as non-music adored only by Black and brown people, only to become the top-selling genre of modern music, worldwide. Employing two turntables playing the same record, Herc developed a style of playing that allowed him to isolate specific rhythms or rhythmic patterns. He looped these parts so they played over and over, sending dancers into a frenzy and electrifying the room. Scores of young African Americans and Latinxs began not only consuming this new style of music, but creating it, along with fashion, vocabulary, and a lifestyle that, today, is holistically identified as hip-hop culture. Despite how hip-hop has morphed in the decades since that fateful night in The Bronx, hip-hop is, at its core, one simple thing: The break. It’s the heart and soul of Gen X, and every generation to come.

--Rhonda Nicole