Beautiful Noise: Music and MLK

Martin Luther King strode into a hotel in Atlanta in August 1967 to the sound of Aretha Franklin’s ‘Respect’ blasting from the loudspeakers. He’d known Aretha a long time. Her father, the Rev. CL Franklin, Minister at the New Bethel Baptist Church in Detroit, was an old friend and fellow-campaigner. King usually stayed with the Franklins when he visited Detroit.

King was in Atlanta to deliver the keynote speech at a convention of DJs. He lauded the roles of Pervis “The Bluesman” Spann of Chicago, Magnificent Montague from Los Angeles, Georgie Woods of Philadelphia, and Tall Paul White, whose radio show had been vital in building the demonstrations which had broken segregation in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963, paving the way for King’s “I have a dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington in August the same year.
He talked of the way music had carried the civil rights message across the world. “You introduced youth to that music and created the language of soul... It is quite amazing to me to hear the rhythms which I enjoyed as a youth coming back across the Atlantic with an English accent.”
It is hard to imagine any political leader nowadays so at ease in the midst of musicians, so readily relating song to the struggles of the age.
A few months earlier, on April 4, 1967, a year to the day before he was to fall to a fusillade of bullets in Memphis, King had told a New York congregation that he could no longer “raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettoes without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today – my own government.”
That did it for King’s standing with the media and the political mainstream. By the time he came to Atlanta, polls showed that fewer than a third of Americans, fewer than half of African Americans, regarded him as a credible leader. Franklin, Harry Belafonte, the great gospel singer Mahalia Jackson and the DJs who had assembled to hear him were among those who had stayed strong.
Back in August 1963, Jackson had prompted – literally – his Lincoln Memorial speech. The moment is easy to find and worth searching out on YouTube.
The speech King was reading wasn’t memorable. The crowd was restless. He began to falter. Mahalia, behind him, remembered a passage he had earlier played with but decided not to include. “Tell them about the dream, Martin.” He may not have heard her. She steps forward again and this time she shouts. Your can hear her, insistent: “Tell them about the dream, Martin!”
“I have a dream,” he began, and launched in rising biblical sing-song into what many still feel to be the most heart-clutching speech in American history. Paragraphs can be recited word-for-word to stir souls anywhere. “When we allow freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, ‘Free at last! Free
at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!’”
There wouldn’t have been that moment without Mahalia Jackson.
These thoughts occurred as I watched coverage of Martin Luther King Day, on January 19, and noted only passing reference to King’s efforts to bring together the civil rights, anti-poverty and anti-war campaigns and no mention at all of the part played by music in powering the movement through a slough of despondency.
Franklin, Jackson, Harry Belefonte, Sam Cook and others of the same ilk weren’t the fund-raising wing or suppliers of celebrity sheen to the civil rights movement, but frontline organisers of fearless confrontation.
It all goes back to the blues as both expression of suffering and shout of defiance. There was a closeness and coherence between music and MLK’s movement which it is hard to detect anywhere today. But it’s what music is made for.