Tomorrow we're celebrating Black History Month at the American Corner. We've put together a presentation on African-American music that should be excellent, if the play list is any indication. Here is the list of songs that we'll be playing all or part of:
- Menu Di Ye Jewe - Babatunde Olatunji
- No Room in the Jailhouse - Reverend J. M. Gates
- Didn't My Lord Deliver Daniel - Howard Roberts Chorale
- Good News - Sweet Honey in the Rock
- What'd I Say - Ray Charles
- Chain of Fools - Aretha Franklin
- I Heard it Through the Grapevine - Marvin Gaye
- Po' Lazarus - James Carter & The Prisoners
- I Got a Gal - Big Joe Turner
- Boom Boom - John Lee Hooker
- One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer - George Thorogood and the Destroyers
- Pineapple Rag - Scott Joplin
- Minnie the Moocher - Cab Calloway
- It Don't Mean a Thing - Duke Ellington w/ Ivie Anderson
- Cottontail - Duke Ellington w/ Ella Fitzgerald
- The Great Pretender - The Platters
- Johnny B. Goode - Chuck Berry
- All Shook Up - Elvis Presley
- Thriller - Michael Jackson
- The Message - Grandmaster Flash
- Cantaloop (Flip Fantasia) - US3
Are there things we missed or left out? Of course. After all, we only have two hours and we need to leave time for discussion. What would you have done differently? Leave a comment...
6 comments:
Megs
More/alternate songs:
STAND BY ME by Ben E. King
I HEARD IT THROUGH THE GRAPEVINE by Marvin Gaye
SHOUT by 'Back to the Future' version or The Isley Brothers
WHEN A MAN LOVES A WOMAN by Percy Sledge
ALso, MLK's 'I have a dream' speech and some discussion of Rosa Parks would seem appropriate.
dad
Hey Bob!
We were originally planning to use the MLK speech, just as an example of "call and response" or audience interaction, like you can hear in Black churches. (If you listen to the audience in the speech, they really get into it!) When we found the J. M. Gates recording of an actual sermon, though, we decided to use that instead.
No anthology of black American music is complete without something from Louis Armstrong. Some also say that Jelly Roll Morton is a "Founding Father" of jazz. (And Miles Davis, Coltrane, Monk, etc etc But you can't be all-inclusive.)
Your program looks terrific
PoppaG
Megs and Dan
oops
SHOUT by Otis Day and the Knights in 'Animal House'
more
IT'S A WONDERFUL WORLD by Louis Armstrong(per PoppaG)
sorry for the repeat on ...Grapevine; it is already in your playlist
PURPLE HAZE by Jimmi Hendrix
dad
We didn't get to Miles et al., but we did decide at the last minute to throw in some Dizzy Gillespie/Charlie Parker.
Several of the participants actually mentioned Louis Armstrong. I'm not sure why we left him out. Ella & Louis, for instance (with the Oscar Peterson accompaniment) is a different sort of jazz from anything we did play.
As a Delawarean, it was nice to see George Thorogood on the list. However, he's about as white as one could get! So, instead of him repping Delaware, how about the incomparable and, alas, short-lived Clifford Brown?
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