A Change Is Gonna Come: Music, Race & the Soul of America, Revised Edition 2006 (first edition 1998), Craig Werner, 469 pages, ISBN 9780472031474, DewA Change Is Gonna Come: Music, Race & the Soul of America, Revised Edition 2006 (first edition 1998), Craig Werner, 469 pages, ISBN 9780472031474, Dewey 780.8996073
Musical and political calls and responses in America, mid-twentieth through early 21st century. Blues realism, jazz vision, and the gospel sense of community. p. 313. "The music got there first and stayed well ahead of the political game." p. 339. "Music is a language more universal than politics." p. 347.
"September 11, 2001, changed the tone of life in the United States more drastically than any event of my lifetime." p. xi [Really? I'd list: * television's domination of news and entertainment, * the availability of the birth-control pill, * white flight to suburbs, ghettoization of cities (after Brown vs. Board), * the murders of John Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and other lifters (http://www.ellawheelerwilcox.org/poem... ), * the Vietnam War and its protests, * the moon landing, * Watergate and mistrust of government, leading to * the Reagan presidency, ending the 40-year governmental attempt to protect us from monopoly and oligopoly power, * the deindustrialization of America, movement of manufacturing to low-wage, low-environmental-protection, countries, * the replacement of countless Main Street businesses by Walmart, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walmart * the end of the fairness doctrine in broadcasting, the radio career of Rush Limbaugh, and the rise of Fox News, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_f... * the advent of the World Wide Web, * Clinton's dismantling of welfare (p. 45) and multiplying the prison population, * the replacement of countless retail stores by amazon.com, * the increasing control of media, academia, and government by oligarchs (detailed in /Dark Money,/ 2016, Jane Mayer, https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... ), * the continuing world-population increase at a rate of 1 billion more people every 12 years https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=... , the more-than-tripling of the U.S. population, the quadrupling of the Hispanic fraction of U.S. population (remember, these are changes, not /all/ of them disasters https://www.pewresearch.org/hispanic/... ), * And musically, as Werner tells in the book: p. 32, the murder of Sam Cooke in 1964, and many other early deaths of musical pioneers, such as Otis Redding, 1967, pp. xvi, 94, ended promising music.]
"Music has registered the emotional texture of the changed world." p. xi.
1619: first slave ship arrives at Jamestown, Virginia. p. xiv.
We can never separate who we are from the people around us. Their fate is our own. p. xviii.
Gospel music gave the civil-rights marchers the strength to go on. p. 4. [There's a wonderful 2001 TV movie, "We Shall Not Be Moved," about the role of the African-American church in the civil-rights struggle, https://www.imdb.com/review/rw3030887/ ]
Motown had great instrumentalists, the Funk Brothers. pp. 20-21. [There's a terrific 2002 documentary about them, https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0314725/ ]
LBJ speaks to Congress for the Voting Rights Act, March 1965: pp. 106-107. https://speakola.com/political/lyndon... Lyndon Johnson made civil rights a cornerstone of his Great Society agenda for the most unlikely of political reasons: he simply thought it was right. But. "The United States spent $500,000 to kill each enemy soldier, but only $35 a year to assist each American in poverty. The bombs of Vietnam explode at home. They destroy the hopes and possibilities of a decent America." --Martin Luther King. p. 108. MLK speaks against the Vietnam War, 1967: https://speakola.com/ideas/martin-lut... pp. 108-109. The liberal movement died in Vietnam.
In the early years of the Vietnam War, blacks suffered 23% of the casualties, despite being only 12% of the military force. p. 111. (/Long Shadows: Veterans' Paths to Peace,/ David Giffey, 2006, tells us that wounded whites were sent to the rear; wounded blacks were sent back out to fight. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8... )
John Coltrane, "Alabama," 1963: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nu297... with images of the bombing that killed four little girls in the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham. p. 130.
Jazz is music that's never played the same way once. --Louis Armstrong. p. 132.
Play something the world's never heard and chances are, it won't hear it this time, either. p. 143.
The revolution never really happened, on TV or anywhere else. p. 173.
White flight, and flight of successful blacks, made American cities increasingly ghettoes. p. 185.
Paul Simon, accepting the 1975 best-album Grammy: "I'd like to thank Stevie Wonder for not making an album this year." p. 187.
More than half the students in Stevie Wonder's Detroit school district came from single-parent homes, in part because Michigan welfare rules denied economic assistance to households in which the father was present. p. 189.
Stevie Wonder once volunteered to judge a beauty contest. p. 189.
1978 marks a turning point in American racial history. Since then, every appeal for racial justice has been attacked for giving "special consideration" to "groups." The crucial debate on equal opportunity never really began. Carter's failure to focus attention on the serious questions raised by the concept of group opportunity ceded the moral high ground and the political majority to Ronald Reagan. The movement has never recovered. p. 196.
The attacks on disco gave respectable voice to the ugliest kinds of unacknowledged racism, sexism, and homophobia. After nearly a quarter century, white America had recovered its sense of self. p. 211.
In places like the South Bronx--and they were in every city--the gospel hopes and jazz visions of the sixties had faded away. What was left was a kind of blues you couldn't always distinguish from pure despair. The new world looked a lot like hell. By the time "The Message" started receiving airplay in 1982, black America was two years into the Reagan administration. The edge loomed close and it was a long long fall. p. 242.
When Reagan convinced us that empty nostalgia was preferable to grim realities, especially the realities of a black America sinking into profound social chaos and despair, we were in bad trouble. p. 245.
The Reagan Rules: pp. 248-249 *Reality is determined by image and anecdote. Reagan was master of transforming a single example, however far removed from any representative situation, into proof of a sweeping generality. When he was finished putting his spin on a situation, reality didn't get a hearing. A black woman who had been convicted of fraud in a case involving $8,000 was transformed into a "welfare queen" with a fleet of Cadillacs and a tax-free income of $150,000, proving that the poor were getting too much help. It sounded good; we bought it. *Too much money is never enough. The rich don't share. *Violence rules. People were sick of being pushed around by little countries like Vietnam and Iran and they were ready to prove they weren't going to take it anymore. */We/ deserve our success. /They/ deserve their failure. The homeless were sleeping on heat grates because that's what they wanted. AIDS was punishment for an immoral lifestyle. /We/ never got high or slept around.
Evil isn't out /there/. It's in /here/. You can't hide from yourself. p. 249.
White and black Americans in effect occupy different nations. p. 253. So says: 1835: /Democracy in America/, Alexis de Toqueville, 1944: /An American Dilemma/, Gunnar Myrdal, 1968: /Report … on Civil Disorders/, Kerner Commission https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerner_... 1992: /Two Nations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal/, Andrew Hacker
Nearly three times as many whites are murdered by blacks as blacks by whites. p. 255.
Americans elected Reagan in nostalgia for "a time when movies were in black and white and so was everything else." --Gil Scott-Heron. p. 258.
Measured by his actions, Bill Clinton may go down in history as the greatest Republican president of the twentieth century. p. 312.
While well over half of crack users were white, 90% of those convicted on crack-related offenses were black. p. 321. The leading cause of death among black men ages 15 to 24 was homicide. p. 322.
"It's been forty years since Sam Cooke promised that a change was gonna come. Change came and change is coming still. Our history's still being lived. What it will be is up to us. Holler if ya hear me. "Peace." --Craig Werner. p. 361.
There's a 29-page playlist, pp. 398-426, of songs mentioned in the text: over 1000 songs. Source notes, pp. 363-397: many books.
Errata: The book by James Ridgeway is /Blood in the Face: The Ku Klux Klan, Aryan Nations, Nazi Skinheads and the Rise of a New White Culture/, 1996. p. 288....more
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