Time, Music, and Liberation

Dear friends,

Certainly, it is difficult for most of Us, particularly young people, to envision time periods of the past. Therefore, with the idea that a generation is about 25 years long, by assuming that a grandmother's age represents two generations or an average of roughly fifty years, We shall look backwards in terms of so many "grandmothers ago". Accordingly, if looking back 200 years, then We're actually talking about four grandmothers ago; that is, the grandmother of one's grandmother's, grandmother's, grandmother. In other words, We are speaking in terms of each grandmother's grandmother as representing 100 years.

Also. for many generations past and to this very day, many Early American Native women (so-called American Indians) have said and continue to say of their menstruation period, "My grandmother is visiting." Consequently, Our use of grandmothers to represent time periods is reasonable.


In any case, for African peoples everywhere, being musicians has been part of Our cultural and psychic structures or internal labor processes, for millennia or scores of grandmothers' lifetimes. Lorenzo Johnston Greene further confirmed this assertion in his timeless book, The Negro In Colonial New England, "Zelah, a Negro of Groton, Massachusetts, who later fought in the American Revolution, became famous in his neighborhood as a musician.".

Greene also refers to Newport Gardner, "...the slave of Caleb Gardner of Newport, Rhode Island, was given music lessons. He soon excelled his teacher and later opened a music school of his own on Pope Street where he taught both Negroes and white persons." (Certainly, the music school that Gardner opened was made possible after he had freed himself from chattel slavery...Greene indicates that, a little more than 200 years or four grandmothers ago, Gardner "purchased" the liberty of himself and most of his family members after winning two thousand dollars in a lottery.)

Finally, it was common for earlier African Americans to look out for each other, by buying Our fellow sisters and brothers out of chattel slavery, if the former received some kind of economic windfall. But like their descendants of today (Hip-hop moguls and wealthy drug dealers, for example), some African Americans used newfound wealth to purchase captive workers (or-called "slaves").  Let's keep things in perspective.

"One Love!" - Bob Marley

G. Djata Bumpus