Black Music Month and Our Contributions to the World!!!

Dear Friends,

During Black Music Month, we should remember that, to be sure, 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.)

The trend of African American musicians has continued since those colonial days, with African American musicians still having major influence on the music of which North Americans like to listen. In Amherst, Massachusetts the now late Ruth Goodwin remembers Mr. Arthur Andrews, a pianist who, she says, was without an equal. the now late Bill Russell, whose family has owned the liquor store in the center of the town for decades, recalls that, during World War II era, his father hired a local African American music group, the Roberts Brothers, to play at the elder Russell's 25th wedding anniversary. Today, Amherst's two colleges and its state university (UMass) boast to have had some of the most respected music professors/musicians in the world, from a variety of musical genres, but particularly those artists who play Black classical music (some of which is often called "jazz". - legendary musical giants with names like Archie Shepp, Max Roach, Yusef Lateef, Clarence Horace Boyer, Ray Copeland, Billy Taylor, and Fred Tillis, to name a few, and all of whom I know have known (because there are now deceased) personally. The aforementioned schools also
had such visitors as Dizzy Gillespie, Oscar Peterson, Mary Lou Williams, Hugh Masakela, Modern Jazz Quartet, Sonny Rollins, Dexter Gordon and the list goes on and on.

G. Djata Bumpus