Still, his countertenor has hints of the same otherworldly aura that Anderson held in the upper reaches of her contralto range. Mobley doesn’t aim for a sprinting pace, but there is a sense of urgency that grabs you by the collar.Ī busy activist when he’s not onstage, Mobley seems to be telling us that this isn’t the time for stoicism or silence these are vital times.
Trotignon’s piano accompaniment is anxious, the left hand playing an endless rhythm like a racing pulse incapable of reaching a resting heart rate. Tracing this lineage, it’s fascinating to see how these songs adapt to the zeitgeist and reflect the signs of their times, both obvious-Ike and Tina Turner were saying the loud part out loud with “Outta Season”-and more subtle: Thurman points to the enduring image of Anderson as “the dignified, stoic, middle-aged Black woman-silent, too, unless her mouth was open in song.” In 2023, countertenor Reginald Mobley’s performance of “Motherless Child,” arranged by Baptiste Trotignon, is also a sign of our times. Both wink-Ike more pointedly, Tina more slyly-and credit the album art to Amos ‘n’ Andy. It was released the following year on “Outta Season,” whose album art features portraits of both Ike and Tina wearing whiteface and eating watermelon. Please reload the page and try again.Īt the time of this speech, Marian Anderson was touring recitals that included both “City Called Heaven” and “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child.” She was four years away from her Lincoln Memorial concert-a concert that only took place because the all-white Daughters of the American Revolution barred her from performing at Constitution Hall, a moment that would cement her multifaceted public image into what Kira Thurman describes as “a civil-rights sound bite.” Ike and Tina Turner recorded “I Am a Motherless Child” in 1968, the same year that Martin Luther King, Jr.
Whoops! There was an error and we couldn't process your subscription. Smith notes that the “language of emotions” contained in spirituals offers the inheritors of that musical tradition “a burning desire to know something of our historical background, and hurl to us, through the years, a challenge to build on that background and take our rightful places by the side of other benefactors of mankind.” Though the conference took place nearly 75 years after the Emancipation Proclamation, she goes on to argue that the descendants of slaves still needed the power of that musical legacy: “Do we, as their descendants, need its power and beauty? Are we economically free? Are we politically free? Will not the demonstration of these achievements convince others that we are entitled to more than we receive?” Despite being nearly a century old, much of “Negro Musicians and their Music” reads more or less as evergreen (which seems poetic given Florida’s latest salvos against equity in the American educational system). In 1935, Lucy Hart Smith, an early pioneer in education equality in the American South (and a polymath when it came to Black heritage), delivered a talk at the annual conference for the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History. The closing couplet shows her work side by side with the spiritual’s original text, and the new meaning that comes from this pairing: “My mother and father don’t own me, I’ll try to make heaven my home.” Her title for the song plays on yet another famous spiritual: “I Am a Motherless Child.” It’s a delicate arrangement, just Turner’s voice in its fathomless low range and Ike Turner’s slightly hollow-sounding blues guitar. The late (do I even have to say “great”?) Tina Turner’s first songwriting credit remains an anomaly in her canon: a riff on “City Called Heaven,” with some of the original text interspersed with Turner’s own lyrics.
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