Black Resonance: Iconic Women Singers and African American Literature

Epilogue. “At Last”:Etta James, Poetry, Hip Hop

Epilogue. “At Last”: Etta James, Poetry, Hip Hop I have focused on the nine artists in this book due to the depth of the writers’ engagements with singers; my desire to analyze artists with whom many readers are likely to be familiar and to make some interventions in scholarly conversations about them; my aim to craft a historical narrative that leads up to (and back to) the Black Arts Movement; and, of course, personal preference. However, Nikki Giovanni’s attention to the backup singers “behind” the stars also prompts reflection on the many artists behind or beyond the ones this book has featured. As my introductory catalogue of literary allusions to singers will have signaled, there are so many other relationships to explore. What new insights, for example, might Sterling Brown’s “Poem for Ma Rainey” (1932) yield about Ma Rainey’s music and Brown’s own work? How might Sherley Anne Williams’s “I Want Aretha to Set This to Music” (1982) attune us to a different aspect of Franklin’s aesthetics than does Giovanni, just as Gayl Jones highlights a different aspect of Billie Holiday’s art than does James Baldwin?1 Another study might also have foregrounded the writer who is most obviously present and absent from this one; although Amiri Baraka’s poetry or commentary appears in nearly every chapter, I do not perform sustained analyses of Baraka’s engagements with women singers such as Sarah Vaughan.2 Moreover, as I stated at the outset, I hope this book indicates new directions for analyzing relationships between black musicians and writers even when those musicians are not female singers. We might examine book-length collections such as Tyehimba Jess’s leadbelly (2005) and 210 / epilogue Ed Pavlic’s Song for Donny Hathaway (2008). We might also reverse the equation and analyze musicians’ engagements with writers. I am thinking , for example, of the fact that Langston Hughes writes the lyrics for Nina Simone’s “Backlash Blues” (1967), that Meshell Ndegeocello titles a song after Eldridge Cleaver’s 1968 memoir Soul on Ice (1993), and that Mos Def and Talib Kweli (Black Star) (re)cite Toni Morrison’s extraordinary ending to The Bluest Eye (1970) in “Thieves in the Night” (1998).3 Put simply, beyond the ensemble of artists centralized here, as Giovanni writes in “Poem for Aretha,” “there are in fact an abundance / of talents just waiting.”4 I want to highlight a few such artists here—especially, the brilliant, late Etta James (1938–2012)—while extending the implications of this project to new sites such as the theater of U.S. politics, contemporary African American poetry, and hip hop. Like the writers in this study, black women artists such as poet Linda Susan Jackson and rapper Jean Grae continue to constitute themselves in relation to the classic singers whose legacies they in turn work to revise and revive. This work is always subversive in the context of an amnesiac twenty-first-century culture industry that obscures black antecedents to white neo-soul and R&B artists and privileges young black “postracial” stars over the elders who paved their way—an impulse apparent even in Barack Obama’s inaugural ceremonies. Against such amnesiac narratives, contemporary black women artists maintain singers’ iconic status in the popular imagination through powerful works that also advance their own signature voices. Inaugural Songs As noted in the previous chapter, Aretha Franklin was the featured singer at Obama’s 2009 inauguration. While less overtly identified with the Civil Rights Movement than Obama’s first choice, the folk singer Odetta, who had passed away earlier that year, Franklin would in retrospect seem like the obvious choice, her appearance reminding anyone who needed reminding that her black feminist anthems and close connection with Martin Luther King Jr. were unshakable Civil Rights credentials that very few living singers could claim. This book’s cover image itself reflects that legacy. As noted in the introduction, the photograph captures Franklin’s performance at a benefit concert for the Martin Luther King Memorial Fund held at Madison Square Garden in late June 1968. “History would assign her the role of the Last Woman Standing, the most full-throated witness of her parents’ generation,” Anthony Heilbut epilogue / 211 writes.5 And during the week of the inauguration, Franklin would again embrace that representative political role: the night before her appearance at the Capitol building, she interpolated a reference to “the days...