Black music for sinners and everyone else

People talk about two things when they talk about director Ryan Coogler’s new film, “Sinners.” The vampires and the juke joint scene. Forget the vampires. All around us every day they suck. But the juke joint? Now that is something. It’s mesmerizing. It’s hypnotic. It leaves your blood racing. It IV drips music straight into the veins.

Perched on the edge of my movie theater seat, I peered into the past and glimpsed the future. I occupied here, and there. Music its heart; Africa its heartbeat. Got me thinking, it makes so much sense that the celebratory month for Black Music is June, the month of joining people together.

Too many Black musicians sowed but never reaped the rewards of creating American cultural master work. Like the color, Black music includes it all: gospel, blues, rhythm and blues, Motown, Philly Sound, gutbucket, hip-hop, rap, and jazz, and Texas country singer Beyonce.

Who cares that Michael McDonald appropriated Black sound? His duets with Patti LaBelle are magic. Herbie Hancock teamed John Legend with Pink in a duet of “Don’t Give Up.” Black musicians dominate Justin Timberlake and Miami rapper Pitbull’s orbits. Black music has abandoned discrimination, because musical genius is a stable.

Quincy Jones, or just Q. So many Black boys named in honor of the producer of “Killer Joe” and Michael Jackson’s “Thriller.”

Marvin Gaye asks “What’s Going On” while straddling the Motown sound with jazz and politics.

Questlove, who doesn’t care what you think about his hair. Leader of a jazz/hip-hop band, the Roots, Questlove was famous before becoming, in 2009, the house band for the “Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon.” His music documentaries preserve Black musical history, including Sly Stone, of Sly and the Family Stone in the 2025 documentary “Sly Lives!” 

Aretha Franklin.

Full stop for the Queen of Soul.

Gratitude for African American music standouts circles the world. The best appreciation came from the Rev. C.L. Franklin, Aretha’s father. At the live recording of her first gospel album, “Amazing Grace,” the good reverend introduces his daughter with a story from her European tour.  “Many of them did not speak English, not conversationally,” he said, and that was clear when fans cheered for “Arethra. Arethra.”

The wrong pronunciation of his daughter’s name mattered little to the Rev. Franklin, a renowned and eloquent orator himself. What mattered lay akin to Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet”: “a rose by any other name would smell just as sweet.” But sometimes sweet failed to describe.

I think Wayne Shorter went on too long on his drum solos for the Jazz Crusaders, but the colonials in South Carolina had their own personal reasons for banning the instrument.

According to Henry Louis Gates and Nellie Y. McKay, the general editors of “The Norton Anthology of African American Literature,” laws against drum mastery came after the 1739 Stono Rebellion, the largest uprising of enslaved Black people in the colonies before the American Revolution. 

The law stated that it is “absolutely necessary” for “safety” to restrain the wanderings and meetings of negroes and other slaves, at all times, and more especially on Saturday Nights, Sundays and other holidays. It promised a fine in “current money” for any master, owner or overseer who shall permit his or their negro or other slave or slaves to at any time beat drums, blow horns or use any other loud instruments.

Restraint of sound kept people standing still. Freedom-seeking African Americans plowed through civil rights struggles singing the anthems “We Shall Overcome” and “Lift Every Voice.”

Live music brings an unequaled energy. I have danced to the Four Tops. In Lansing! But radio — that is the people’s medium, and media top dog DJ Metro Melik excels. Summer festivals fire the desire of students to learn classical jazz from professional bass player Rodney Whitaker, director of the MSU jazz studies program.

Music and movement refuse to be separated.

Remember when the school-to-prison pipeline was news? When third-grade reading levels helped determine how many prison beds would be needed in a decade? When more Black young men languished in prison than studied in college? And Black women were sitting, not dancing, at parties?

These were all consequences of a social-economic-political problem: mass incarceration of young Black men. American society has done little to solve that, but Stevie Wonder came to the rescue of wall-flowered African American women.

His 1987 hit “My Eyes Don’t Cry” came complete with the line dance called the Hustle. Jarring the hetero-norm that an African American woman must partner with a man to dance, the Hustle ushered in a bittersweet liberty: Black women could dance alone or with each other.

The nearly four decades since the release of “My Eyes Don’t Cry” has seen many new hustle songs and hustles. My past fav was the “Cupid Shuffle.” Now the rage is “Boots on the Ground.“ This Texas hustle is accented by sound effects from dancers whapping their handheld fans.

A choreography showcasing resiliency, the Hustle is the African American woman’s tribal dance. Now at the first thump of the bass line, men and women hit the floor.  Africa in full bloom on the dance floor.

Black music eases trials, produces joy, helps make great memories and vanquish bad ones. With incredible power it helps heart, mind and soul triumph over evil, to endure, to savor this one good life with joy. 

(Lansing resident Dedria Humphries Barker of Lansing is the author of “Mother of Orphans: The True and Curious Story of Irish Alice, A Colored Man’s Widow.”)