Lincoln's Emancipation

By Jack E. White

Her name is Abbey Lincoln, but she also answers to Aminata Moseka when the spirit moves her. She started out as Anna Marie Wooldridge, then became Gaby Lee and, for a time, Mrs. Max Roach. If all these shifts in appellation suggest a life that has gone through many changes, that's hardly the whole story. They also indicate that this remarkable singer's managers have tried several times to reinvent her to suit themselves. Talking with her now, it is difficult to believe such a self-consciously independent woman would permit anyone to tinker with her name, much less something as precious as her identity. At 63, Lincoln is in full command of both her life and her art.

Her style has been likened to Billie Holiday's. It is a comparison that Lincoln, who has recorded two albums of Holiday's songs, encourages -- up to a point. Says she: "I can't imagine what it would have been for me if she hadn't been there." Like Holiday's, Lincoln's voice can be harsh. But she invariably finds the emotional center of a lyric, singing every syllable clearly enough to satisfy the standards of a BBC announcer.

When it comes to content, Lincoln draws the line. Twenty years ago, she decided she would no longer sing about "no-good men and how they mistreat you," as Holiday, a legendary masochist when it came to love, so often did. Instead, Lincoln celebrates the self-reliance of a black woman who has freed herself from the limitations of race, marriage and the opinions of other people, black or white. "I'm at odds with this society, with this culture," she says. "I'm somebody who likes to have something to say. If nobody wants to hear it, that's O.K. with me."

She needn't worry. Her 1990 Verve release, The World Is Falling Down, Lincoln's first recording on a major label in more than a dozen years, sold well. In 1991 You Gotta Pay the Band, with saxophonist Stan Getz, sold even better, reaching the top of the jazz charts and staying there for months. Her current Devil's Got Your Tongue is ranked No. 7 on Billboard's jazz chart.

Lincoln wrote the lyrics to the best songs on all three albums. Some, such as I've Got Thunder (and It Rings) are prickly proclamations of self-esteem ("I'm a woman hard to handle, if you need to handle things./ Better run when I start coming. I've got thunder and it rings"). Others, like Story of My Father, evoke a sense of roots that go back through segregation and slavery all the way to Africa. There are also scornful lectures such as the one for rap singers in the title tune on Devil's Got Your Tongue: Lincoln accuses them of lewdly denigrating black culture to make a buck ("Tell a dirty story,/ of a lowly jerk,/ Even though the joke's on us, it's supposed to work"). Though her words can verge on sanctimony, Lincoln's impish delivery saves her from preachiness.

Her current popularity is a welcome reverse; only a few years ago, she thought that "I was going to die in obscurity." Reared in rural Calvin Center, Michigan, where she performed in storefront churches, she ventured to Los Angeles and got her first break -- and first name change, to Gaby Lee -- warbling love songs at a faux-Parisian nightclub called the Moulin Rouge. She was later dubbed Abbey Lincoln, after the 16th President, by a manager who quipped, "Old Abe didn't really free the slaves, but maybe you can."

Lincoln soon began to make a name for herself. In 1957 she fell in love with Max Roach, the great bebop percussionist, whom she married five years later. The civil rights movement was gathering momentum, and Lincoln got swept along in it. She was one of the first black women to wear her hair in a natural, Afro style, and her music underwent a similar transformation. In 1960 she sang on Roach's Freedom Now Suite, an urgent blast against America's homegrown version of apartheid. She also starred in Nothing But a Man, a poignant 1962 film about the civil rights movement that has just been rereleased.

Things began to fall apart during the 1970s. Lincoln stormed out of her marriage to Roach, and record producers grew wary of her outspoken views. "They said I wasn't commercial because I didn't know how to shut up and just sing the song and forget all that stuff," says Lincoln. She spent most of the next two decades in Los Angeles, living in a garage apartment and supporting herself mostly as a schoolteacher.

In 1988 she got a call from French producer Jean-Philippe Allard, who signed her up for Verve. To Lincoln that was proof that African-American artists who take themselves seriously are more appreciated overseas than in their own ! homeland, even by other blacks. "I belong to a people who don't know what they have yet and will give anything away," says Lincoln. "They are always reaching and grabbing for other people's things. It's not a condemnation but an observation." The contract with Verve not only provided Lincoln with more financial security but also gave her freedom. "Now I know I can come up with a song and get a chance to record it," she says. For jazz fans everywhere, that is Lincoln's greatest gift.