The Beatles Are Here! (21 page)

White Out

by Judy Juanita

AMERICAN SOCIETY WAS
one big happy family in the 1950s. A melting pot, a Jell-O and white-bread land of perfection and gleaming surfaces. Not for a minute. The truth is, America was one big white out.
Gr
owing up in the fifties, my siblings and I had to choose between watching
Make Room for Daddy
or
I Love Lucy
for school-night television. On Sunday nights, though, the whole family watched
The
Ed Sullivan Show
on our one set, the high point being when a performer of our race came on. (We didn’t use the word
black
in self-description then.)

The famous colored pop artists—Sammy Davis Jr., Johnny Mathis, Leslie Uggams, Dionne Warwick, Nat King Cole—were so extraordinarily talented they seemed to glow. And yet they looked, to my adolescent eyes, like gifted pets of their benevolent white mentors (Frank Sinatra, Mitch Miller, Burt Bacharach), a status that befit the show’s colorful menagerie of chimps, flamenco dancers, and sensations like Elvis Presley. Colored performers and musicians who seemed of independent mind—Harry Belafonte, Richie Havens, Odetta—had careers in folk or bluegrass, further from the mainstream.

The poet Amiri Baraka would say later the only good thing about television back then was that colored people weren’t on it. There was a loss of dignity when black people entered the arena of television and had to do what white and white-minded directors and producers wanted them to do. Anyway, we weren’t, for the most part, on TV at all, except for
Beulah
and a token on
Star Trek
. We were nowhere in advertising.

The sixties meant crew cuts, skinny ties, matching suits, “Teen Angel,” the Beach Boys, the top forty playlist, 45-rpm records, spinning the songs. But in the parallel America, rhythm & blues (R&B) artists were busy providing the gritty backdrop to the violence and oppression of the American dream. Rioters, marchers, protesters, and regular folk followed a different drummer, doing as a popular 1964 song advised: getting “right down to the real nitty gritty.” The breathlessness of the countdown to the top fifteen hits on “Your Hit Parade,” sponsored by Lucky Strike cigarettes, matched the breathlessness of executions occurring with the same exciting regularity.

Nineteen sixty-three was a banner year for the black race. Things were heating up in the streets. That April, Martin Luther King wrote “Letter from Birmingham Jail” to white clergymen who wanted racial segregation to be addressed exclusively in courts, not the streets. The next month, Bull Connor set fire hoses and attack dogs on the marchers in Birmingham. August saw the March on Washington, timed to commemorate the Emancipation Proclamation’s 100th anniversary—a great peak for the civil rights movement.

The miracle of television was a lucky strike for the civil rights movement. The abolitionist movement 100 years earlier had gained traction once the world, i.e. London society, understood the horror and treachery of slavery from ex-slaves like Frederick Douglass speaking abroad or from slave narratives. And similarly the civil rights movement gained universal spotlight once viewers saw the hosing, brutality, flaming buses, and overturned normalcy of a South under siege from protestors and arch segregationists.

The England–America exchange of influence went back and forth. At a Beatles concert in Plymouth, Great Britain, in November 1963, police used high-pressure hoses on screaming fans, a show of authority that matched the hosing of demonstrators in Birmingham six months earlier.

Meanwhile, there I was, a black girl in East Oakland, playing the string bass in my junior and senior high school orchestras. As we toured in school festivals throughout northern California, my fellow bassist, a member of the Escovedo musical family, tried to lure me into nightclubs for $10-a-night gigs. I knew better than to mention that to my strict Christian mother. But I loved music and craved it, especially Bo Diddley, Motown, and salsa. I often danced in front of my mirror for six hours at a clip.

Diddley had fused a 3-2 clave with rhythm and blues, and rock and roll. A Bo Diddley beat was a clave-based motif, clave being the name of the patterns played on two hardwood sticks in Afro-Cuban music ensembles
.
This syncopated accent on the “off beat” was perfect for the click-and-slip of my pelvis as I bopped around my bedroom dance floor in my early teens. I thought I had invented a new dance until I started partying and found that this hip-click to the off beat was the way black kids danced in the Bay Area. Thank goodness for osmosis.

In 1963 Sly Stone was a hip young DJ who hadn’t yet changed his birth name of Sylvester Stewart. He was fresh out of Vallejo and the same CME/AME church gospel choir circuit I attended as a youth. He was firing up listeners in the San Francisco Bay Area on KSOL which he nicknamed K-SOUL. I had a painful crush on him.

My Oakland, pre-1964, was house parties, spiked punch, segregated radio and five-channel TV, servicemen getting off the ships at the Port of Oakland looking for a good time. My Oakland, post-1964, was sets (nobody said house party, they said, “Are you going to the set on Snake Rd.?”), marijuana, stoned white college boys in khakis, hippies in VW buses covered in psychedelic colors, Make Love Not War signs, and longer hair on everybody. First came the swivel-hipped Elvis, then Beatlemania, then the floodgates opened.

The Brits were shaking up American society once again. When I first heard the Beatles, I got a pure musical thrill. When I bumped into a black girl on the steps at my community college listening as her plastic transistor radio played “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” her passion, all the more strange because she was black, got my attention. Crushing on the Beatles, she held on to a 45 of the song like it was a rare gem.

Being a black urban teen, I was into Motown, the Temptations, James Brown, Chuck Berry, the Supremes, and the Moonglows. I didn’t crush on the Beatles like I did with Sly, Eddie Kendricks, and David Ruffin. But that’s the good thing about it.

Of course, I didn’t know what was happening technically, that on “Please Please Please” and “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” the Beatles used a double back beat, i.e., an off beat played as a one-quarter note. But I knew something even better—I liked it and I could dance to it. The Beatles, a convergence of R&B and pop, brought a great swinging movement from blond to dark, from privileged surfer children in the suburbs to the darkness of Liverpool’s working class, an amalgam that curiously celebrated its R&B roots.

Neither white nor black parents could control what happened after The Pill. By the time I watched the Beatles on
Ed Sullivan
in 1964 in my parents’ living room, I had started college and knew a lot more about sex than I let on to my mother and father. All the prepubescent and adolescent white girls having orgasmic and orgiastic responses in public released a long-suppressed sexuality from its Victorian, Southern, and Puritan constraints. As these women let it rip in that prolonged moment of free public expression, I believe they freed up black women from whoredom, from bearing the brunt and hard edge of the white man’s sexuality. We were no longer the only culturally sanctioned objects of naughty or forbidden sex, of plantation promiscuity. Stripping, nudity, free sex, skinny dipping, open marriage, group sex—sexuality came out of the closet and into the open.

Giddy with our post–high school hipness, my best friend and I regularly drove to San Francisco and hopped the cable car up to a nightclub called Copacabana West, where we danced with abandon all night. I didn’t know about the connection to my black roots. Or that the United States embargo against Cuba cut off Americans from overt knowledge of the Cuban influence on music, especially R&B. I just loved being able to mambo, rumba, and cha-cha with a different partner for every spin on the floor. I loved the twenty- and thirty-minute sets.

Before the age of eighteen, we had been dying to get into Finnochio’s, the all-male drag nightclub in North Beach that was like forbidden fruit. When finally we got past the velvet rope, the make-up looked caked, the wigs ratty, the clothing dirty, and the drag too uncool to be enjoyable, let alone believable. I was thoroughly disappointed.

In a sense, that was one more dismantling of the American sociocultural foundation underneath me. Just as Finnochio’s female impersonators would give way to the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, as the gay pride, sexual freedom, and gender-equality movements strengthened, American media and television’s near complete white out would be toppled by musical, cultural, and social protest.

Some look at the Beatles and say they appropriated black R&B, that they exploited it. But they acknowledged it as elemental and, by doing so, opened the door for Ike and Tina Turner, James Brown, and a host of performers—once colored, now black—to share some of the rewards. Touring abroad helped many acts from the chitlin circuit to beat the fabled seven-year lifespan of American pop music and extend their showbiz longevity abroad. (Getting their health to hold out and resisting drug abuse would prove as daunting a task as overcoming segregation.)

It’s not too much to say the Beatles helped close the gap between colored and white America, the schism. Like a slap in the smug mug of white America, the Brits acknowledged black roots. They showed how white America had unapologetically ripped off black people for centuries, never giving a whole race credit for inventing the new American art forms of jazz, gospel, blues, and R&B. America never had been held accountable to blacks, morally, fiscally, or legally.

With the Beatles and the British invasion, black music and rock joined for a new backdrop to the morality play called American society. White wasn’t completely out, but black was seeping in. The Beatles brought black music to the forefront. There it was on stage, front and center.

Renée Fleming, soprano

MY EXPOSURE TO
the Beatles began when I was in junior high school in Rochester, New York, and my English teacher did a unit on some of their songs. It was the first time anyone had ever suggested that lyrics or musicians, contemporary musicians in particular, could have a contribution to make to poetry or to culture in general. “Eleanor Rigby” was my favorite song in those days.

My next experience with them was in high school. I was in a small, select singing group and we did a Beatles medley. Later, I met my husband when I moved to New York, and I just heard the music all the time. He was a real Beatles fan, so I heard a lot of their music and learned a bit about it.

I’ve realized over time that very few songwriters have had such a longlasting influence as the Beatles. It’s gone on for decades. Their popularity has been extraordinary, but their influence has been even more so. Their music is so stylistically broad, far-reaching, and of such an extraordinarily high quality that it has influenced not just the generation that came after them, but multiple generations of music lovers and songwriters.

Their music lends itself to many, many different treatments. Many of their songs, such as “In My Life” [which Fleming recorded in her 2005 album
Haunted Heart
], have been arranged in any number of combinations. They have a vivid timelessness to them.

Back when I was in college and singing jazz, I was mostly singing the American songbook, with just a few exceptions. I didn’t sing the Beatles then. In those days, the repertoire was more specific. Now anything goes. People perform pretty much any piece they want, which is wonderful. There’s more crossover.

As for singing “In My Life,” well, the words are so poignant. The original version is so upbeat and heavily pop influenced. So when [pianist and composer, who played on
Haunted Heart
] Fred Hersch said, “Actually, let’s look at the song this way,” it gave it a completely different sound. I think it’s beautiful and haunting and poignant. And the words already are.

What’s interesting to me is that the Beatles were so young when they wrote that song and yet, for me, it’s about imagining that you’re at the end of your life and looking back. It’s a statement about what’s been most important. It’s so interesting that they had the ability to do that!

I sang “In My Life” in the lower part of my voice, which is how I approach all popular music. It’s more spoken. I don’t have the ability to change how I produce my sound in my upper register. It takes a long time to develop the musculature and technique that we do for classical singing for singing without amplification, so when I listen to someone like Sutton Foster, or someone on Broadway who has a high belt, I think, “Boy, how do they do that?” but I wouldn’t want to attempt to learn it at this point. I don’t want to try to sing in a different way than I always have.