Creating a Contiuum

A few decades after Billie Holiday's songs faded from the limelight, a new jazz musician became a preeminent influence on a variety of styles which were being born. Charles Mingus, bassist and band leader, composed music which was as exacting as it stylistically diverse. Influences from gospel and blues are common in many works such as "Goodbye Pork Pie Hat" and "Wednesday Night Prayer Meeting," and his aptitude strayed into the Latin genre with "Haitian Fight Song" and "Eat that Chicken." While incorporating styles from across the spectrum of jazz at the time, Mingus was also one of the only vocal figures in the political scene of the late 50's and early 60's.
In 1957 the governor of Alabama, Orval Faubus, resisted the attempt of nine black students to integrate a Little Rock school by bringing in the National Guard. Soon after, Mingus and his band recorded the "Fables of Faubus."
***
Oh, Lord, don't let 'em shoot us!
Oh, Lord, don't let 'em stab us!
Oh, Lord, don't let 'em tar and feather us!
Oh, Lord, no more swastikas!
Oh, Lord, no more Ku Klux Klan!

Name me someone who's ridiculous, Dannie.
Governor Faubus!
Why is he so sick and ridiculous?
He won't permit integrated schools.

Then he's a fool! Boo! Nazi Fascist supremacists!
Boo! Ku Klux Klan (with your Jim Crow plan)

Name me a handful that's ridiculous, Dannie Richmond.
Faubus, Rockefeller, Eisenhower
Why are they so sick and ridiculous?

Two, four, six, eight:
They brainwash and teach you hate.
H-E-L-L-O, Hello.
***
Columbia records first released the album without the words, opting instead for a version which had a series of nonsensical moaning. Skirting controversy and editing the song for a more "free jazz" tone, the act implies a fundamental theory about protest in modern America. US citizens are prone to ignoring a group of people in protest, quick to imply that change need not occur--or if at all very ,slowly.* Likewise, change-makers can only be accepted if they are a Founding Father, Abe Lincoln, or Martin Luther King Jr. Other figures are decried as godless commies (W.E.B. Dubois) or Islamic militarists (Malcom X), when in truth all are an inevitable reaction to an action, an action which has proven unrelenting in asserting itself as dominant since the country began its own solidarity against an Imperialist Britian.

So where is that in the scheme of post-bop jazz? Simply, it implies the likelihood of an 'activist'-labeled musician's words reaching the listener. To assert oneself and decry an act, one must be something else before they break into the realm of the political/human rights. Toni Morrison must be an Oprah's Book Club author before Paradise is read, Octavia Butler's Fledgling must be compared to Gibson's Neuromancer, and Mingus must be a gospel/blues/latin post-bop bassist before he speaks out against a racist governor.


*Nina Simone notes; "me and my people just about due / ... They keep on sayin' go slow! / But that's just the trouble"
MLKj notes; waiting "340 years for constitutional and God-given" rights is certainly long enough for a system to change of its own volition--now is the time for making tension and change.