NO MUSIC LIKE THAT MUSIC

Nobody has more vividly evoked the kind of supercharged evangelist-gospel atmosphere of Aretha Franklin's childhood than Black Novelist James Baldwin (a onetime Harlem storefront preacher). In his 1963 book, The Fire Next Time, he wrote:

THERE is no music like that music, no drama like the drama of the saints rejoicing, the sinners moaning, the tambourines racing, and all those voices coming together and crying holy unto the Lord. I have never seen anything to equal the fire and excitement that sometimes, without warning, fill a church, causing the church, as Leadbelly and so many others have testified, to "rock." Nothing that has happened to me since equals the power and the glory that I sometimes felt when . . . the church and I were one. Their pain and their joy were mine, and mine were theirs . . . and their cries of "Amen!" and "Hallelujah!" and "Yes, Lord!," "Praise His name!," "Preach it, brother!" sustained and whipped on my solos until we all became equal, wringing wet singing and dancing, in anguish and rejoicing, at the foot of the altar.

There was a zest and a joy and a capacity for facing and surviving disaster that are very moving and very rare. Perhaps we were, all of us--pimps, whores, racketeers, church members, and children--bound together by the nature of our oppression. If so, within these limits we sometimes achieved with each other a freedom that was close to love. I remember, anyway, church suppers and outings, and, later, after I left the church, rent and waistline parties where rage and sorrow sat in the darkness and did not stir, and we ate and drank and talked and laughed and danced and forgot all about "the man."

This is the freedom that one hears in some gospel songs, for example, and in jazz. In all jazz, and especially in the blues, there is something tart and ironic, authoritative and double edged. White Americans do not understand the depths out of which such an ironic tenacity comes but they suspect that the force is sensual. To be sensual, I think; is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of living to the breaking of bread.

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