Requiem for Martin Luther King Jr.

The slain civil rights leader’s legacy in African-American music.

Requiem for Martin Luther King Jr.
Salamishah Tillet |

Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. has rightfully been celebrated as one of the most important political leaders of the 20th century, but he doesn’t get the credit for his significant influence on African-American music.

Most music lovers and civil-rights-history buffs know that James Brown, the “Godfather of Soul,” headlined an unforgettable concert in Boston on the night of April 4, 1968, immediately after King was assassinated in Memphis. Memorialized in David Leaf’s documentary, The Night James Brown Saved Boston, James Brown’s riveting performance transfixed his television and live audience to such a degree that a riot was averted in Boston and a (temporary) interracial mourning period resulted.

This mourning shaped more than James Brown’s concert that night. It led artists like Nina Simone and Bill Cosby to record original compositions about King’s death. Nina Simone first performed “Why? (The King of Love is Dead),” written by her bassist Gene Taylor, at the Westbury Musical Festival in Long Island, N.Y., three days after King’s assassination. Unlike the up-tempo beat of her 1963 political anthem “Mississippi Goddamn,” written in response to the Birmingham church bombing, Simone’s eulogy to King was a sonic mélange that opened with the simple chords of the protestant hymn and ended in a preach song. This shift in musical rhetoric was never arbitrary, but signaled a transformation in American politics as well. Similar to James Brown, Simone appeared before an interracial audience and her simple tribute futilely asked the question “why” King had to die, but also substituted the irony and impatience of her earlier protest music with a paean to national mourning.

While Simone’s elegy conveyed what King himself once called the “disappointment” of the black power movement, Bill Cosby’s 1971 jazz-funk composition, “Martin’s Funeral” is an even more radical. Recorded with the Badfoot Brown & the Bunions Bradford Funeral Marching Band, Cosby’s album features only two songs, the first is a jazz-funk instrumental tribute to Martin on which Cosby plays electronic piano. Music critic Thomas Jurek describes the song as “building for 20 minutes from sad reverence and mournful marching into stomping rage, and finally, into release and acceptance.” In both his 2,000-word liner notes and the intense complexity of the music itself, Cosby admits his song was inspired by his attendance of King’s funeral service. When Cosby’s song, which features percussionist Big Black on bass drum, merged jazz and funk, it served as a musical metaphor for a generation that fought optimistically for civil rights, but now turned inward to create a new sound and beat, for their black power ideologies.

Read the Full Essay @ The Root

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Salamishah Tillet is an assistant professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania and co-founder of the non-profit organization, A Long Walk Home, Inc., which uses art therapy and the visual and performing arts to document and to end violence against underserved women and children.