From Blackface to Beyoncé
Arts & Ideas
BBC
4.2 • 599 Ratings
🗓️ 31 March 2021
⏱️ 45 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Hanif Abdurraqib, the American poet and essayist, has written a book in praise of black performance challenging stereotypes and recovering figures including the magician Ellen Armstrong who performed along the Atlantic seaboard in the 1900s, the dancer William Henry Lane described by Dickens and Merry Clayton, the gospel singer who performed on the Rolling Stones song Gimme Shelter. He joins New Generation Thinker Adjoa Osei and Dawn Walton, founder of Eclipse Theatre Company for a conversation with Matthew Sweet looking at how attitudes towards black performance have changed - or not.
Hanif Abdurraqib's book is called A Little Devil in America: In Praise of Black Performance.
Dawn Walton is directing The Death of a Black Man by Alfred Fagon at the Hampstead Theatre 28 May – 10 July. It premiered at that theatre in 1975.
Adjoa Osei is a 2021 New Generation Thinker on the scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to make radio from academic research. She researches at the University of Liverpool and her postcard looks at the Brazilian TV series on Netflix Coisa Mais Linda or Girls from Ipanema.
You can find a playlist on the Free Thinking website exploring identity from speakers including Eddie Glaude Jr and Nadia Owusu on James Baldwin; the writers JJ Bola and Derek Owusu in an episode about masculinity; novelist Paul Mendez in a discussion about Queer Bloomsbury; a quartet of artists on the Black British Art movement, Le Gateau Chocolat in a discussion about the subversion of Cabaret and Suzan-Lori Parks on her play Father Comes Home from the Wars https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p06jngzt and a second playlist offers other discussions exploring Black History https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p08t2qbp
The Lights Up festival of performance is running across BBC Radio 3 and 4 and BBC TV. The opening drama Giles Terera's The Meaning of Zong is available now on BBC Sounds https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m000tdk4
Producer: Caitlin Benedict
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that is some level of genius. It also helps |
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| 0:34.8 | Whitney Houston, Aretha Franklin, Josephine Baker, Elaine Brown. Just some of the stars will be cited in this edition of the Arts and Ideas podcast. My name's Matthew Sweet and our guests begin stargazing after this message. |
| 0:53.0 | Sound of Gaming, the monthly show from BBC Radio 3, which opens up the incredible world of gaming music. |
| 1:01.0 | I'm Louise Blaine and every month I'll be featuring some of the very best gaming scores, |
| 1:07.0 | offering insights into how the music works with the gameplay, talking to composers about how they set about creating their scores. |
| 1:15.6 | I've classic tracks, I've also got the latest new releases. |
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| 1:46.9 | You'll have heard this before because it's canonical, a key work of the 60s. It's the Rolling Stones' Gimmy Shelter, a cry of rage from that moment when the news |
| 1:52.4 | was either the moon landings or the Mely Massacre. |
| 1:56.0 | Mick Jagger is the male voice, but there's a female one here too, and you might not know her name, |
| 2:01.9 | even if you bought the album from which this comes, because it was spelt wrong on the sleeve. |
| 2:07.7 | It's Mary Clayton, who joins Jagger for the second verse, and who's carrying something |
| 2:12.8 | almost unspeakably intense into this song. She's tired, you see, because it's after midnight, and she got called in at short notice, |
| 2:22.0 | and she's heavily pregnant, and she's sitting on a stool in the Elektra recording studio in Los Angeles, |
| 2:28.0 | and she's crying out the lyrics of the song. |
| 2:59.1 | A moment of the song. And what she's giving here is so strong that you can hear, and try to read them, understand what they mean, and why we should care to do so. |
| 3:06.3 | We're doing this because our text and quite a lot of our |
| 3:08.6 | context is supplied by the poet and essayist Hanif Abdu Rakip, who relates this moment in his |
| 3:14.8 | new book. It's called A Little Devil in America, a glowing and dazzling work that links a constellation |
| 3:21.6 | of similar moments in the history of black performance. |
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