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Neil Hilborn
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Motown
Motown
Roger Guenveur Smith said, ' you like black music but you hate black people, you like black music but you hate black people.'
Growing up, I liked black music and I did not know any black people.
In the suburbs of Houston, your only black friends are Diana Ross, Sam Cook, and Otis Redding.
So here's what I knew about black people:
They liked to be in love.
If someone could love them back, that was even better.
They liked to do the twist.
They liked Jesus just as much as Jesus liked them.
They ended up on a lot of chain gangs, but at least it's work and at least you get to sing.
They're waiting on some kind of change to come, but no one would tell me what that change was.
So I knew that somewhere in Georgia, a man's screaming but no one's holding a gun to his head.
See, Lee Moses is in love and his woman been running around on him.
Now, the bass is going into its fifth bar and the guitars have already been playing for three and the horn players are spitting on their valves and Lee's gotta tell them, he's gotta let them know his mamma was right, 'She ain't no kind woman.'
And the horns are screaming, now Lee's screaming.
Now this is what falling out of love sounds like.
Ma Rainey said, 'White people love how the blues come out, but they don't know how it got in there.'
High school was the first time I saw the Birmingham fire hoses, the first time 'Steal Away to Jesus' meant anything more than quiet prayer.
Now, when Sam's having a party, everybody's swinging, it sounds like, 'Thank god, let's dance 'cause the white people ain't here yet.'
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Sounds like, 'Tomorrow I might get shot or arrested, so please, Mr. DJ, keep those records playing.'
I still sing along like no one ever died, like I can scrub away white guilt with a soft shoe shuffle.
But Sam could have been singing about me; he could have been singing about my parents.
I don't know if my ancestors posed in some swamp in white robes with burning crosses, so tell me, can I sing about a chain gang if I'm the one holding the whip?
When I do the twist in my kitchen, am I jumping Jim Crow?
If I sing about strange fruit blowing in the wind, am I singing about my family tree?
So I went home to Texas.
I turned on the radio.
Otis was still sitting on that dock in that bay.
I cannot understand the pain that made the artist.
This does not I can't understand the art.
We poets, we people of the lamp and lighters of dark places.
This is what we know:
Take your pain, make it beautiful, make them dance.
It's so hard to hate something beautiful.
It's so hard to hate someone who is capable of love.
It's so hard to hate someone when they're singing.
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