Is There Confusion?

A friend asked us to throw down some recommendations on Betty Davis, an easy enough task. We'll load up a clip in no time.

But she's left us some devilishly difficult 2ns, and we hesitate to throw such things into anyone's field of vision without offering a few prayers of our own.

:: pours a little liquor on the ground::

In Betty's work there's the groove, the voice and the visuals. And then there's sex (as in m/f) and beauty (as in aesthetics). They pile up all over Betty, just as she wanted, but, if the record (as in public, and as opposed to rekkids, slabs, 2ns or the whathaveyous we use to refer to the work in the tradition) tells us anything, it is that we treat her work as a ball of confusion.

Light in the Attic's rediscovery of Betty Davis was not only inevitable, but long overdue. Erudite cratediggers shoulda, coulda, woulda found their way to her stuff in the Thriller era 80s, instead of waiting 'til the Lady Gaga and Shakira era* 00s if they were brave enough. There must have been business hurdles they couldn't jump, or her sh1t woulda been loose again in the market before Rick James was smoking crack.

When Betty's albums first hit the racks there was no shortage of demand for groove. For those of us lissenning so late in the game, the trick is to distinguish it from all of the lofty precursors assigned in hindsight to Betty's list of influences. She's got deepsoul in her biography: the Jimi Hendrix boo rumor, the Miles Davis husband portion of her biography, the Greg Errico connection to Sly Stone and the Larry Graham connection to Graham Central Station. But we gotta call her sh1t her own. She shakes it fast, and right in front of us. She's not hanging behind it, waiting for us to find her lurking.

Her voice has more to do w/ Gil Scott Heron or the Last Poets, than Chaka Kahn, Patti Labelle, Marva Whitney or Vicki Anderson. The listed queenz all have something to tell us, but Betty is working hard to teach us a lesson on top of it. This expressly didactic tone in her voice sometimes feels, at least after the fact of nearly four decades, like a lecture on how to get the whole sexual power thing right. The too easy thing to do today is to call her ahead of her time. There is something much more fair to her than to call her the forerunner of a sexual revolution that is now over. She's only as good a singer as James "Blood" Ulmer, but that's the point. And that is why she sounds more right to lissenners versed in hearing Ma Rainey or Missy Elliot.

Then there's her body of visual work†, prolly the biggest source of distraction for fans and detractors. It's not surprising that someone who began her career doing fashion spreads for girls magazines has an eye for her own appearance, and a strong sense of how to push people around using that media. Her visual rhetoric, a move she busted the streets 7 years before Prince delivered his Dirty Mind,‡ is an outmoving spiral of irony and sincerity. It doesn't stop being one or the other. Just like Prince, Betty uses sex to write checks she can't fully cash. Just deal and move on. There's no point in averting your eyes, even if it won't free your ass when you keep on staring.

So, like Marvin says: "Come on, get to this":

• Betty Davis, "Anti-Love Song," Betty Davis (1973).
• Betty Davis, "Shoo-B-Doop and Cop Him," They Say I'm Different (1974).
• Betty Davis, "He Was a Big Freak," They Say I'm Different (1974).
• Betty Davis, "They Say I'm Different," They Say I'm Different (1974).

These bullets are more than Brechtian exercises in drawing the lissener into a trap of desire x guilt = historical consciousness. They are an articulation of a tension the harsh voice of the day today and the sweet voice that promises something better that made Phillis Wheatley make a fetish of looking to the east (as in back across the Atlantic) to a creole dawn.

About 60 years before Betty Davis invited us to meet her at these crossroads to witness her conjure a Black Madonna, Jessie Fauset, who's now a sister of Maman Brigitte, invited us to pray to another angel, Sojourner Truth:

Symbolic mother, we thy myriad sons,

Pounding our stubborn heart on Freedom's bars,

Clutching our birthright, fight with faces set

Still visioning the stars.

This is Betty's tradition. This is our tradition and we're happy to join her there. So high you can't get over it. So low you can't get under it. It goes on and on and on and on. To the break of dawn.

* We got nothing bad to say about these followers of Madonna. They are well-educated and offer a theory of action. There's just so much more things to say.

†

, etc.

‡

, etc.

Working Through: P R O S P E C T

Now that we are moving our quicker thoughts, glimpses and lissening notes over to the red light, the blue light becomes the place for our longer thoughts only. The Body and Soul Project, still underway, is the best and maybe the only example of what we gonna be up to.

In upcoming weeks, we'll be working through extended exercises that we will call working through. The all about will remain the same, though. We're gonna make the fabric of what the AEC called ancient to future out of other peoples' threads.

Five starting points:

• James Weldon Johnson, The Book of American Negro Poetry
• Devilin.' This thinking was given to us by Allen Lowe, a heroic anthologist, who proves there is salvation at the crossroads between what we know and the new details we learn.
  
• Raekwon, Only Built 4 Cuban Links
• Goodie Mob, Soul Food
  
• OutKast, Aquemini

There's plenty of other threads, and we expect to work them in as we go. The last three are, obviously, an indulgence in the love massive we have for a body of hiphop that takes its place in a history it enacts.

In the mean time, we'll keep elaborating on the threads we're already playing out:

• Life and Times of Marvin Gaye (what ever happened to that one, anyway).
• Body and Soul
• Versionology. The psuedoscience that the old world likes to label variation on a theme (to be confused w/ fugues and fugue states, conditions it treats with escalating gravity, hoping to cure it w/ copyright and other controls.).
  

Body and Soul: Vocal Approaches/Lyrics

By now, we've laid out one of those pictures with two sides.* On one side we have "Body and Soul" the framework for heroic solo instrumentalism.† On the other, we introduced a foundational post, where the song stands up in its earliest versions as a singer's tune.‡

The singers remind us that it's a song w/ lyrics, not just Johnny Green's work, a torchy melody wrapped around some tough chord changes that have lured the mighty tenors of the 20th c. into a titanic struggle with one another.

First, a couple of bullets:

• Frank Sinatra, "Body and Soul" (1947). Another reference version. Blue-eyed soul worth knowing by heart.
• Louis Armstrong and His New Sebastian Club Seranaders, "Body and Soul" (1930). We already cited this masterpiece as the beginning of the jazz versions of the song. Listen for Lionel Hampton on the vibes.
  
• Sarah Vaughan, "Body and Soul" (1954). From the extraordinary slab, Swingin' Easy, which sports John Malachi on piano, Joe Benjamin on bass, and Roy Haynes brushing out an elegant and gentle groove on drums.
• Billie Holiday, "Body and Soul" (1940). Includes some soulful bars at the intro and the break by Roy Eldridge, as well as a solid combo composed of Jimmy Powell and Carl Frye alto sax, Kermit Scott tenor sax, Sonny White piano, Lawrence Lucie guitar, John Williams bass, and Harold "Doc" West drums.

Today, though, the words of Edward Heyman, Robert Sour and Frank Eyton draw us. If we discard the bad latinate grammar ("for you I sigh" or "my life a wreck you're making"), the song starts our sad and gets sadder. Rejected, the singer must offer more and more of themselves to prove their devotion. Loss yields surrender, and surrender escalates with more loss. It's excruciating. Each of the first three versions cited above turn on the third verse:

My life a wreck you’re making.
You know I’m yours for just the taking.
I’d gladly surrender
Myself to you body and soul.

Sinatra's version just plays the loser's version straight. Armstrong's ends with the heartbreaking grunt. Sassy's grows torchier with every verse.

But no one suffers in song like Billie Holiday. For all others, "Body and Soul" is a about giving up it up after it won't matter. Lady takes a sad song, flips one word -- "wreck" goes to "hell" without the author's permission -- in the first line of the third verse, and makes it one of spiritual loss.

My life a hell you’re making
You know I’m yours for just the takin’
I’d gladly surrender
Myself to you, body and soul

She's giving up her soul, not her body. In other versions it the other way around. And where others foreshorten the song, lyrically, she drags out Heyman, Sour and Green for all its worth:

What lies before me?
A future that’s stormy
A winter that’s gray and cold

Unless there’s magic
The end will be tragic
And echo a tale that’s been told
So often

With her recast version, we can almost re-read the entire song, line by line, as a version of "Crossroads Blues." In the face of a stormy future (no one sings about bad the promise of bad weather better than the Lady), she begs for a spell to stave off the too familiar sad ending.

Due to this dubscience, the final verse takes on its own totally new meaning:

My life revolves about you
What earthly good am I without you?
Oh I tell you I mean it
I’m all for you, body and soul

Earthly good? None. The tossed away remains of this Faustian bargain have no heaven, only hell. All for you, body and soul.

* Maybe it's a 7" rekkid, which the people have mislabled a "single" even though it's got an A side and a B side.
† Stop here and here.
‡ Stop here.

School of Ragtime

We're in a 'nothering field again, kings and queenz. We enter w/out as much preparation as we should, really just playas. But we're moved to come off of the wall and enter, even tough we're not ready.

But as we enter we find some of the same things, even if they're arranges differently: You start w/ the darktown swells, raising the standard*; then there's the wild creole style; there's the sexy allure of dance step instructions†; there's the tension between the old world and the new; and then there's the accusations about paving the road to hell.‡ Finally and never to late, there's a buncha scholars who think they missed it, so they go back to find their way back to the roots.

Here's a couple of bullets in the clip for you to marinate on.

• Scott Joplin, "Ragtime Dance."
• Air, "Ragtime Dance." We've been lissening to this one since it was an unnaground hit in the vinyl days. Best drum solo in the 70s, a real shoe tickler.◊

You must learn.

* Take partners do the "rag two step", I know you are enjoying yourselves,
You are representatives of dark town's wealth. Stop where you are!

† Ev'rybody now "form a line", Dance nothing but the real ragtime.
Do your best, "forward four steps", you are all very fine.
Let me see you do the "back step prance", Be graceful at ev'ry chance.
You are now enjoying the "ragtime dance". Ev'ry body sing.

‡ The hall was illuminated by electric lights, It certainly was a sight to see;
So many colored folks there without a razor fight... 'Twas a great surprise to me.

◊ Notice. To get the desired effect of "stop time" the pianist will please stamp the heel of one foot heavily upon the floor at every word "stamp." Do not raise the toe of the foot from the floor while stamping. Author.

From Terence's Library

At the risk of being labeled a repeater pencil, what we're all about here is pulling together the threads into a fabric. Fact is there's so much things to say, that we are opening another store, one where we pull our loose and stray threads out before we weave them together here. It's mainly a copybook, but you may want to drop by to find out what we're working on.

P E A C E

Body and Soul: Prehawk

We've put a tied up a coupla knots in this B&S thread already. Let's now get to the start.

"Body and Soul" is a pop tune, from back in the day when pop tunes came from musical theater. It was a feature song in Three's a Crowd. The versionologist to takes it from the stage, samples it, makes it new by putting it into the tradition. Again and again. That's how we begin.

To this end, let's load a crowd of bullets in the clip from 1930. It's a straightforward case:

• Ruth Etting, "Body and Soul." Etting was not above living the blues. Check that portion of her bio where her husband shoots her lover and gets a year upstate.
• Paul Whiteman and His Orchestra, "Body and Soul." The vocal is by Whiteman's trombone player, Jack Fulton. No need to tell you that Whiteman was the Elvis or Eminem of his day, grinding hits that more proper people wanted curbed 'cause they were creating bad habits among the youth. But that's all in the tradition, too.
• Louis Armstrong* and His Orchestra, "Body and Soul." Odd man out. Here's where the story begins.

J Y E A H

* We have so much things to say about the man. We'll be back at it. He basically made the 20th century up from mud and straw in the streets. We're still living under that spell.

Digging

All over that Quincy Jones OST. Ready to look through the crates and move on to The Italian Job. We are already everywhere.


J Y E A H

Note added 12 hours later: there is something to be said about creating menace w/ what at the time was an "urban" sounding soundtrack in a movie bout terror far away from any city. A future remake should consider using Dock Boggs tunes to make the point. Think on it.

Upcoming Reading

We're behind in our readings. Just wanted to show you that we'll get to it.

In the mean time, we're opening up another front here: commonplace. We think of it more as a copybook, but it's all part of the same on and on and on and on.

P E A C E

Body and Soul -- Reference Version

A few days ago we mapped up a project to go through our stacks of "Body and Soul." We loaded a clip of 38 bullets and began walking the streets of the Diamond, our ear to the ground. At that moment, this project, like every one, became bigger just as we began. We look up. We look down. We get case of the vertigo. For us this means we gotta keep on, even tho the work is so high we can't get over it, and so low we can't get under it. Isn't that the way it is, all the time and any way you choose it. You can find it. You just can't lose it.

So let's lay down the next mark, one that will hold our gaze as we listen to e/thing else.

• Coleman Hawkins, "Body and Soul."
  

Constant readers will predict that when we first spun this hit up, it was from the Smithsonian text book. We started listening to it 37 years after it hit the jukebox, and we been listening to it for 33 years. That makes it one of the foundation stones, at least in our pile.

We put these marks down on the first of two days of the martyrs (w/ the other coming in February). As we keep marking this thread up, we'll be putting down what we learn from studying the versions. This versionology is an occult science.

Here, tho, is all we can say today: there is something in the spell cast by a foundation stone. It's not the first. It's not the last. It's the one that holds other to the building. We think that on a day like today, Martyr's Day, this is something to think on. Body and soul.


P E A C E

Something Sweet, But No Twankle

We'll get back to the Body and Soul thread before long.

In the mean time, we were up before the break of dawn, listening to the other J5 and we found more proof of the one and on and on and on. Therefore a couple of bullets:

• San Juan Government School Girls, "There's a Brown Girl in the Ring." Old school. Direct to tape demo. No overdubs. No sampling. Unnaneath the street. Right from the crossroads.*
• Jurassic 5, "Brown Girl." The Jurassics were certainly dub scientists, and were signifying in every direction on this cut.
  

It's a great abundance, even w/out Boney M. Too much to keep it to ourselves.

Find peace in this holy week, kings and queens, and if you stop step in the circle, show me your motion.


* Don't neglect the Girls greatest hit, "Sammie Dead-O."