'Left of Black': Episode #25 featuring Guy Ramsey, Jr. and Esther Iverem

Left of Black #25
w/Guthrie “Guy” Ramsey, Jr. and Esther Iverem
March 14, 2011

Left of Black host Mark Anthony Neal is joined via Skype by musician, author, professor and curator Guthrie Ramsey, Jr.. Later Black indie digital media pioneer and SeeingBlack.com founder Esther Iverem, joins Neal, also via Skype.

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→Guthrie Ramsey, Jr. is the Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Term Professor of Music at the University of Pennsylvania and co-curator of Ain’t Nothing Like the Real Thing: How the Apollo Theater Shaped American Entertainment, currently exhibited at the Museum of the City of New York. Ramsey is the author of Race Music: Black Cultures from Bebop to Hip-Hop ( University of California Press, 2003) and the forthcoming In Walked Bud: Earl “Bud ” Powell and the Modern Jazz Challenge.

→Esther Iverem is founder and editor of SeeingBlack.com, which celebrates its 10th anniversary this year. A journalist, poet and author, Iverem’s most recent book is We Gotta Have It: Twenty Years of Seeing Black at the Movies, 1986-2006 (Thunder’s Mouth Press). A former staff writer for several newspapers, including The Washington Post and New York Newsday, she is the recipient of numerous honors, including a USC Annenberg/Getty Arts Journalism Fellowship, a National Arts Journalism Fellowship and an artist’s fellowship from the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities. She is also a member of the Washington Area Film Critics Association and the Alliance of Women Film Journalists.

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Left of Black is a weekly Webcast hosted by Mark Anthony Neal and produced in collaboration with the John Hope Franklin Center at Duke University.

Forty Years of Philadelphia Sound

Songwriters Leon Huff and Kenneth Gamble composed tunes with political messages for chart-toppers like the O’Jays and Billy Paul.

Forty Years of Philadelphia Sound
By Jim Morrison

When Leon Huff and Kenneth Gamble would huddle to write songs, they’d each bring a long, yellow legal pad of potential titles, sometimes 200 or 300 each. Huff would sit at the upright piano in his office with a tape recorder rolling. He would start playing and Gamble would riff lyrics. “Sometimes [the songs] would take 15 minutes to write and sometimes they’d take all day,” Gamble recalls. “The best ones came in ten, fifteen minutes.”

The two first ran into each other in an elevator in Philadelphia’s Schubert Building, where they were working as songwriters on separate floors. Soon after, they met at Huff’s Camden, New Jersey home on a Saturday and wrote six or seven songs the first day. “It was an easy, easy fit,” Gamble recalls.

During the 60s, they had moderate success with hits like “Expressway to Your Heart” by the Soul Survivors, “Cowboys to Girls” by the Intruders and “Only the Strong Survive” by Jerry Butler.

But they wanted to be more than writers and producers of regional hits who occasionally made a national mark. The opportunity came 40 years ago in 1971 when Columbia Records, hoping to finally break into the black music market, gave them a $75,000 advance to record singles and another $25,000 for a small number of albums. With the money, Gamble and Huff opened their own label, Philadelphia International Records (PIR).

As they sat down to compose following the deal, the Vietnam War raged on, conflicts over desegregation spread across the country and civil war ravaged Pakistan. “We were talking about the world and why people really can’t work together. All this confusion going on in the world,” Gamble says. “So we were talking about how you need something to bring people together.”

One of the titles on a legal pad had promise: “Love Train.” Huff fingered the piano. Gamble, the words guy, began singing, “People all over the world, join hands, form a love train.”

Within 15 minutes, he recalls, they had a song for the O’Jays, a group from Canton, Ohio, that had considered calling it quits after a couple of minor chart successes. Gamble and Huff had spotted them three years earlier opening a show at Harlem’s Apollo Theater. While Eddie Levert had been singing lead for the trio, they liked the interplay between Levert and Walter Williams they saw onstage. So for the first singles on PIR, they wrote songs featuring the two trading vocals. “I knew once we put our leads on Back Stabbers it had the potential to be something special, but I didn’t know to what magnitude,” Williams says.

Read the Full Essay @ Smithsonian.com

Ain't Nothing Like the Real Thing: The Smithsonian Does The Apollo

Ain’t Nothing Like the Real Thing: How the Apollo Theater Shaped American Entertainment organized by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture.

Exhibition on Apollo Theater Coming to Smithsonian

by Lee Mergner

Guthrie Ramsey can’t wait for the exhibition on the Apollo Theater to open at the Smithsonian. The musicologist has been working for almost two years on the exhibit that eventually will tour the U.S.. The moment he’s waiting for is when he walks through the show with the general public and sees their reaction to the sights and sounds that he and his co-curator Tuliza Fleming organized for the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. “That is going to be so special,” says Ramsey. “I can’t wait.”

The first exhibition to explore the Apollo Theater’s seminal impact on American popular culture, Ain’t Nothing Like the Real Thing: How the Apollo Theater Shaped American Entertainment examines the rich history and cultural significance of the legendary Harlem theater, tracing the story from its origins as a segregated burlesque hall to its starring role at the epicenter of African American entertainment and American popular culture.

Organized by NMAAHC in association with the Apollo and in celebration of the Apollo's 75th Anniversary, Ain't Nothing Like the Real Thing will be on view in the new museum's gallery in the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History from April 23, 2010 until August 29, 2010.

Following its premiere in Washington D.C., the exhibition will be presented at Detroit's Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History from October 1, 2010 - January 2, 2011, at the Museum of the City of New York from January 30, 2011 - May 1, 2011, and in four additional U.S. cities to be announced. The tour is being presented in partnership with the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service.

This was Ramsey’s first exhibition, but as a professor of musicology at University of Pennsylvania and a scholar of African-American culture (and a part-time musician), he managed to debut with a dream project: presenting the incredible history of perhaps America’s most famous performing arts theater. “The Apollo is so familiar and ubiquitous that you take it for granted, but it’s really a storied place,” explains Ramsey. “The challenge for me was to switch to focus on an object rather than music. Tuliza [Fleming] had done a lot of museum curating before, so I think we made a great team.”

Read the Full Essay @ JazzTimes

Yinka Shonibare MBE @ the Smithsonian

Yinka Shonibare MBE’s career retrospective at the Smithsonian just goes to show how strange things get when the empire strikes black.

The (Not So) New World Order
by Natalie Hopkinson

How “explicit” could the images be? Queen Elizabeth II herself proclaimed the artist The Most Excellent Order of the British Empire. Yinka Shonibare MBE, the Brit-Nigerian art world star, toast of two continents, was having a mid-career retrospective at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art.

So my kindergartener and I sailed past the warning signs, past the objections of the concerned security guard, turned a corner and immediately understood:

One headless female mannequin, bathed in classic Victorian crinoline dress rendered in an African textile print, stood bent over, rear end raised doggy-style to meet the groin of another headless male. Behind him, another headless man penetrated him. Steps away, another crinoline-clad woman kneeled, her head tucked beneath a swatch of African cloth as she pleasured another headless woman. Still another headless woman sat on a wooden bench, legs spread-eagled, shoulders thrown back in the throes of passion.

The art installation, “Gallery and Criminal Conversation,” was a play on the Victorian morality, norms, manners and social structures that have come to define the British Empire. The orgiastic scene was the London-born/Lagos-reared artist’s way of throwing all this supposed order into chaos. Kind of like the time he arrived at his London art opening trailed by two white slaves.

These days, life is indeed stranger than art. The Eurocentric world order has been turned upside down. This little show by the Yoruba trickster-artist is just another picture of what happens when the empire strikes black.

Read Full Essay @ The ROOT