Hey America! E-Book

Stuart Cosgrove

• Herausgeber: Polygon
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Seitenzahl: 644

Beschreibung

This is the untold story of black music – its triumph over racism, segregation, undercapitalised record labels, media discrimination and political anxiety – told through the perspective of the most powerful office in the world: from Louis Armstrong's spat with President Eisenhower and Eartha Kitt's stormy encounter with Lady Bird Johnson to James Brown's flirtation with Nixon, Reaganomics and the 'Cop Killer' scandal. Moving, insightful and wide-ranging, Hey America! charts the evolution of sixties soul from the margins of American society to the mainstream, culminating in the rise of urban hip-hop and the dramatic stand-off between Donald Trump and the Black Lives Matter movement. 

Leseprobe

A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR

Stuart Cosgrove, originally from Perth, was a fanzine writer on the northern soul scene before he joined the black music paper Echoes as a staff writer. He became media editor with the NME, a feature writer for a range of newspapers and magazines, and a television programme executive at Channel 4, for which he won numerous awards. Stuart is a prominent radio broadcaster in Scotland and is the author of several critically acclaimed books on music, most notably his trilogy of books on soul music and social change.

PRAISE FOR STUART COSGROVE

CASSIUS X

‘A delightful ride in a cherry-red Cadillac, with soul music on the radio and a steady hand at the wheel. A thoroughly enjoyable journey’Jonathan Eig, author of Ali: A Life

‘Crisply written, fast-paced and original, this book surges with the kind of effervescence we have long associated with a young Cassius Clay. Even the most informed Muhammad Ali fan will learn something new from this book . . . Filled with colourful details, with a learned eye toward the music of the era, Cassius X hits all the right notes’Michael Ezra, author of Muhammad Ali: The Making of an Icon

‘An exciting trip through the urban worlds of boxing, soul music, and crime, as Cassius Clay joins the Nation of Islam, becomes Muhammad Ali, and ascends the ranks of boxing to become World Heavyweight Champion during the early 1960s’Lewis Erenberg, author of The Rumble in the Jungle

‘There are many books about Muhammad Ali, but none like Stuart Cosgrove’s Cassius X. Focusing on the athlete’s transformation from Cassius Clay to Muhammad Ali, Cosgrove provides the reader with an extraordinary view of the radical psychological and spiritual changes that Ali experienced during the early part of his career. He does this while expertly weaving in the social upheaval during the Civil Rights era and how those events shaped the boxer’s personal evolution . . . a model of how biographies of African Americans should be written’Ray Winbush, author of Belinda’s Petition: A Concise History of Reparations for the Transatlantic Slave Trade

‘A fresh hook on the Muhammad Ali story’The Times

‘An engrossing and revelatory read . . . and a great playlist. You do not have to be a fan of boxing or soul music to love this book’Val McDermid

HARLEM 69: THE FUTURE OF SOUL

‘Cosgrove’s impressive, dogged groundwork is matched by a deep devotion to the music that is the backbone of the narrative . . . An essential read for anyone interested in the politics and culture of the late 60s, when soul music reflected the momentum of a tumultuous era that resonates still’Sean O’Hagan, The Observer

‘An impressively granular month-by-month deep dive into Harlem’s fertile musical response to a time of social and political upheaval’ Financial Times, Best Books of 2018

‘Not only a gripping socio-cultural history, it feels truly novelistic. Harlem throbs thrillingly . . . and Cosgrove captures it vividly: heroin, civic decay, gravediggers’ strikes, gender-fluid gangsters, Vietnam vets, Puerto Rican boxers and all . . . Harlem 69 makes startling connections across time and place’Graeme Thomson, Uncut

‘The best music writing this year is about black music. Cosgrove’s deep dive into the year’s events is an epic feat of archival research that has been expertly marshalled into a narrative that joins the dots between Donny Hathaway, Jimi Hendrix, the Black Panthers, police corruption and the Vietnam war’ Teddy Jamieson, The Herald, Best Music Books of 2018

‘Cosgrove’s series can be read separately, but to read them as a trilogy gives a real sense of black music and social movements . . . paints a vivid, detailed picture of the intensity of social deprivation and resistance, and also the way that’s reflected in, but also affected by, the music of those cities. Reading Harlem 69 made me want to do two things – dig out and play some of the records mentioned, and fight the powers that be’Socialist Review

MEMPHIS 68: THE TRAGEDY OF SOUTHERN SOUL

Winner of the Penderyn Music Book Prize, 2018Mojo – Books of the Year #4, 2017Rough Trade – Music Book of the Year, 2018Shindig – Book of the Year, 2017

‘Offers us a map of Memphis in that most revolutionary of years, 1968. Music writing as both crime reporting and political commentary’The Herald

‘Cosgrove’s selection of his subjects is unerring, and clearly rooted in personal passion . . . an authorial voice which is as easily, blissfully evocative as a classic soul seven-inch’David Pollock, The List

‘Highly recommended! Astounding body of learning. Future classic. Go!’SoulSource.co.uk

‘As ever, Cosgrove’s lucid, entertaining prose is laden with detail, but never at the expense of the wider narrative. Hinging on that Memphis destination, he traces the savage dichotomy at the city’s heart: it was the site of multi-racial soul imprint Stax but also the place where Martin Luther King was killed. A heartbreaking but essential read, and one that feels remarkably timely’Clash Magazine, Best Books of 2017

‘Stuart Cosgrove’s whole life has been shaped by soul – first as a music journalist and now as a chronicler of black American music’s social context’Sunday Herald

DETROIT 67: THE YEAR THAT CHANGED SOUL

‘The story is unbelievably rich. Motown, the radical hippie underground, a trigger-happy police force, Vietnam, a disaffected young black community, inclement weather, The Supremes, the army, strikes, fiscal austerity, murders – all these elements coalesced, as Cosgrove noted, to create a remarkable year. In fact, as the book gathers pace, one can’t help think how the hell did this city survive it all? . . . it contains some of the best ever writing and insight about Motown. Ever’Paolo Hewitt, Caught by the River

‘The subhead for Stuart Cosgrove’s Detroit 67 is “the year that changed soul”. But this thing contains multitudes, and digs in deep, well beyond just the city’s music industry in that fateful year . . . All of this is written about with precision, empathy, and a great, deep love for the city of Detroit’Detroit Metro Times

‘Big daddy of soul books . . . weaves a thoroughly researched, epic tale of musical intrigues and escalating social violence’TeamRock

‘Cosgrove weaves a compelling web of circumstance that maps a city struggling with the loss of its youth to the Vietnam War, the hard edge of the civil rights movement and ferocious inner-city rioting . . . a whole-hearted evocation of people and places filled with the confidence that it is telling a tale set at a fulcrum of American social and cultural history’The Independent

‘Leading black music label Motown is at the heart of the story, and 1967 is one of Motown’s more turbulent years, but it’s set against the backdrop of growing opposition to the war in Vietnam, police brutality, a disaffected black population, rioting, strikes in the Big Three car plants and what seemed like the imminent breakdown of society . . . You finish the book with a real sense of a city in crisis and of how some artists reflected events’Socialist Review

Fight the Power: Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders shares the stage with hip-hop activist Chuck D of Public Enemy Radio in 2020. Band co-founder Flavor Flav, not a Sanders fan, had been fired hours before they took to the stage.

Let us realize the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.—Dr Martin Luther King Jr

I was always a politician from the day the civil rights people chose me as their protest singer.—Nina Simone

Life is a wheel of fortune and it’s my turn to spin it.—Tupac Shakur

First published in Great Britain in 2022 by Polygon.an imprint of Birlinn Ltd.

Birlinn Ltd

West Newington House

10 Newington Road

Edinburgh

EH9 1QS

www.polygonbooks.co.uk

1

Copyright © Stuart Cosgrove 2022

The right of Stuart Cosgrove to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved.

Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders.

If any omissions have been made, the publisher will be happy to rectify these in future editions.

ISBN 978 1 84697 584 4eBook ISBN 978 1 78885 519 8

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication DataA catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library.

Typeset by 3btype.com

CONTENTS

Foreword

1. The Audacity of Soul

2. Hey, Hey, LBJ! How Many Kids Did You Kill Today?

3. James Brown – Nixon’s Clown

4. I Am Somebody

5. Disco Inferno

6. The CNN of the Ghetto

7. ‘Cop Killer’ and the Cold Dead Hands

8. Hurricane Katrina

9. The Battle for Chocolate City

Hey America! Playlists

Bibliography

Index

FOREWORD

It has been an immense privilege to have had the opportunity to write extensively about African American music. It was a journey that began at the Letham Community Centre Soul Club in Perth, Scotland, where I grew up and first heard the great sixties soul singers of Motown and Stax. I had the privilege to win a Major Scottish Studentship, funded by the Scottish Education Authority in the years before we had our own Parliament. It was a scholarship that supported my studies at Hull University and took me variously to Howard University in Washington D.C. and George Mason University, North Virginia. But the greatest training came not within formal education but on the northern soul scene – an unrivalled academy of underground and independent soul. It was through the soul fanzine movement that I came to write for Black Echoes, the NME and The Face before a career in television at Channel 4.

The roots of this book were sown in the Soul Trilogy. My three books spanning the latter years of the 1960s across three remarkable cities – Detroit 67, Memphis 68 and Harlem 69 have all been published by Polygon, an independent imprint in Edinburgh, who also published my most recent book Cassius X.

My thanks to everyone who has helped me on the way, not least my close friends and family but special thanks go to my editor Alison Rae, who has guided me through the tunnel.

Stuart Cosgrove2022

Prince, audacious superstar of the Minneapolis Sound, died in 2016 while Barack Obama was on a presidential tour of Europe and the Middle East.

1

THE AUDACITY OF SOUL

Listen Up: ‘Lean On Me’ by Mary J. Blige, live from the Lincoln Memorial at Barack Obama’s Inaugural Celebration

At 9.43 a.m. on 21 April 2016, an unidentified male phoned the Sheriff’s Office in Carver County, Minnesota. ‘We have someone who is unconscious,’ he mumbled. The caller had no idea what address he was calling from so the emergency responder, Emily Colestack, a 45-yearold mother of two teenage kids, deployed geolocational software. She identified the address as a private dwelling at 7801 Audubon Road in Chanhassen, southwest of Minneapolis. The emergency response team arrived to find a body, alone and unresponsive, in a lift. They performed emergency CPR, but the man had been dead for at least several hours and the team sent word to the Sheriff’s Office to prepare for the aftermath. The body was that of a 57-year-old African American male from Minneapolis, whose registered birth name was Prince Rogers Nelson but who was known globally by the stage name Prince – and briefly, during a spat with Warners, by the rebellious ‘love symbol’ that translated as the Artist Formerly Known as Prince.

According to a press release issued by the Midwest Medical Examiner’s Office, the star had died of an accidental overdose of the opioid fentanyl, which is used both as a legitimate painkiller and as a recreational drug when mixed with heroin and cocaine. It emerged that after his last-ever show in Atlanta, six days before his death, Prince’s private jet had been forced to land in Moline, Illinois, where doctors gave him a ‘save shot’ of naloxone, an emergency procedure used in cases of opiate overdose. There were rumours that Prince had been suffering from pneumonia in recent weeks, that he had been due to meet with an addiction specialist the following day, and the musician’s brother-in-law claimed that Prince had worked ‘154 hours straight’ the week before.

President Barack Obama was several thousand feet above Saudi Arabia on Air Force One, the presidential plane, when he heard of Prince’s death. He had just left a frosty meeting with the Saudi king, Salman bin Abdulaziz, about the war in Yemen and a congressional report implying that Saudi Arabia may have played a role in the attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon on 9/11.

Even Obama’s effortless charm had not thawed the atmosphere and their conversation had been stilted, burdened by interpreters and the contested events in a turbulent Middle East. There were large sections of Saudi society who did not trust Obama, whose visit came five years after the country’s most infamous citizen, Osama bin Laden, was killed in Abbottabad, Pakistan. The aftermath of the operation, which was led by US Navy Seals, was a triumphalist moment for America. Obama, together with Vice President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, had watched the early-morning raid from the White House Situation Room, and the scene had engendered a fury in al-Qaeda, who resented the US’s military presence and any display of American supremacism.

Obama had been relieved to leave the region, and by the time Air Force One landed in the UK on the next leg of the President’s trip, Prince’s body was under the care of the Midwest Medical Examiner’s Office, in a brownstone building off Veterans Drive in Ramsey, Minneapolis. The autopsy report confirmed the singer had died of poisoning by self-administered opiates. Obama scribbled a personal note, which was soon circulating via social media.

Today, the world lost a creative icon. Michelle and I join millions of fans from around the world in mourning the sudden death of Prince. Few artists have influenced the sound and trajectory of popular music more distinctly or touched quite so many people with their talent. As one of the most gifted and prolific musicians of our time, Prince did it all. Funk. R&B. Rock and roll. He was a virtuoso instrumentalist, a brilliant bandleader, and an electrifying performer. A strong spirit transcends rules, and nobody’s spirit was stronger, bolder, or more creative. Our thoughts and prayers are with his family, his band and all who loved him.

Obama’s requiem to Prince went viral and for the first time ever the word ‘funk’ entered the formal lexicon of the White House. It was a moment that said much about fame and celebrity but even more about the journey of African American music across the twentieth century. The Obamas were attracted to Prince not simply because of his fame but because of the way he had broken the rules around race and representation and created a space where two of the major genres of the twentieth century, rock and soul, could merge. A year earlier, Prince had performed at an informal private party at the White House, joining Stevie Wonder on stage. Despite his outrageous stage presence, Obama found Prince to be quiet, self-deprecating and seemingly overawed by the event.

Obama was in the UK to meet Prime Minister David Cameron, on a mission to persuade wavering British voters not to ditch membership of the European Union in a forthcoming referendum. Following in the footsteps of previous presidents, Obama stayed at Winfield House in Regent’s Park, the official residence of the US ambassador, Matthew Barzun. Barzun was a major ‘bundler’ and one-time Obama fundraiser who had raised over $1 million in grassroots campaigns during the presidential elections. He was also a music fan who, on leaving his post, bowed out to a song by the Trinidad and Tobagian calypso singer Lord Kitchener: ‘London Is The Place For Me’. It was the era of vinyl revivalism and Barzun had bought a vintage turntable for the sumptuous Gold Room at Winfield House. It was here, on the morning of the bilateral talks, that the two men, one the first black president and the other a white ambassador, paid their respects to Prince. Barzun dug out Prince’s signature song, ‘Purple Rain’, and together they listened as the needle gently found its groove. For all its extraordinary and life-affirming moments over the decades, this was the point when soul music finally triumphed – not in its ghetto heartlands of Detroit or Chicago, nor on the stage of the Harlem Apollo nor in the studios of Muscle Shoals, but here amidst the antique furniture, porcelain and glass chandeliers of a palatial townhouse in London. By every measure of political decorum and protocol it was bold. Here was the first black president, interrupting the business of state and delaying a meeting with the British to listen to ‘Purple Rain’ on an old turntable.

In Obama’s eyes, Prince had merged the two great railway tracks of twentieth-century music – rock and soul – and in that respect he was a pioneer rather than just a pop star. At a press conference in central London later that day, Obama again picked up the theme of requiem in a speech broadcast around the world. ‘I love Prince because he put out great music and he was a great performer,’ he said. ‘I didn’t know him well; he came to perform at the White House last year and he was extraordinary, and creative, and original, and full of energy.’ In fact, for all the outward respect, Prince had not even voted for Obama. ‘I’m one of the Jehovah’s Witnesses,’ he told talk show host Tavis Smiley. ‘And we’ve never voted. That’s not to say I don’t think . . . President Obama is a very smart individual, and he seems like he means well. Prophecy is what we all have to go by now.’

At their meeting, Cameron gave Obama an assurance that the referendum would reconfirm Britain’s commitment to the European project and that the ‘special relationship’ that dated back to the Second World War would continue untroubled. He was wrong. The UK voted by a narrow margin to leave the European Union, and Cameron resigned. For months ahead of their meeting the media had portrayed the relationship as a ‘bromance’ and like a ‘buddy movie’ – the two men even attended a collegiate basketball game together in Dayton, Ohio. They were superficially friendly, but it was just another day in a carefully massaged media circus where Obama excelled as the charismatic ringmaster. There was no great bond between them, and there never had been. According to one of Cameron’s closest aides, political strategist Steve Hilton, Cameron thought Obama was ‘one of the most narcissistic, self-absorbed people he’d ever dealt with’. For his part, Obama never dignified the remarks, suspecting that most Americans couldn’t identify Cameron in a police line-up.

Soul music was nearly fifty years old when the first black president came to power. Among Barack Obama’s many attributes was the eloquent way he crafted an inspiring story of social change. Music played a substantial part in his narrative, energising his presidential campaign, providing the soundtrack to his years in the White House, and acting as a harbinger of hope for a different kind of America. More than that, he reached out to new and younger forms of urban music which in the main had been demonised by past presidents. His years in power were the culmination of decades of political upheaval during which soul music shifted from the margins to the mainstream of American life, through the setbacks and victories of civil rights. It was music that spoke mostly of love and devotion but often gave voice to the interminable fight against discrimination. As it transformed across the years, fragmenting into many different urban genres, Obama’s presidency signalled the final triumph of black music, a radiant brilliance that can only be described as the audacity of soul.

One of Obama’s most potent techniques was in using music as a mode of communication, as a touchstone and as an emotional signpost. For Obama, embracing soul was not simply about being the first black president: it reflected a deeply held sense of history. He understood that the music had emerged from the great journey from slavery to emancipation, from the rural South to the urban North and from segregation to civil rights. He also knew instinctively that respect had to be shown to every station on the track, from spirituals to gospel, from blues to soul and from disco to hip-hop, that the music had echoed the hopes and dreams of his people and the inevitability of change.

In its simplest sense, the audacity of soul is the story of civil rights, but it is much bigger than that: it is a story of immaculate voices, of vile exploitation, of deprived inner-city upbringings, of unrivalled glamour, of racy over-consumption and, eventually, global success. But for most occupants of the White House, if soul music registered at all it was synonymous only with civil rights, and even then, only for a few epic songs like Sam Cooke’s ‘A Change Is Gonna Come’ and Aretha Franklin’s ‘Respect’. Beneath that historic canopy lies a more complex story, one in which black music became the messenger, communicating injustices and challenging the authority of the presidency, sometimes in ways that were opaque and sometimes by giving voice to full-blown anger and fiery social protest. There was Johnny Copeland’s ‘Sufferin City’ (Atlantic, 1969), a hyped-up blues song that captured the pressures of urban life; Mary Love’s ‘Lay This Burden Down’ (Modern, 1967), a sixties soul release still carrying the burden of slavery; and James Carr’s ‘Freedom Train’ (Goldwax, 1968), a Memphis classic which looked back to the underground railroad and indentured slaves’ escape north to freedom.

In the decades before Obama’s presidency, the black musicians who were invited to perform in the White House were those who had the highest status and most trusted reputation. The embossed invitations sent out by previous presidents to the aristocracy of black music conferred a coded racial acceptance. The great gospel legend Mahalia Jackson performed for President Eisenhower in the White House and sang at the inauguration of John F. Kennedy in 1969; Duke Ellington was presented with the nation’s highest civilian honour, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, by President Nixon; and, in 1976, jazz singer Ella Fitzgerald performed for President Ford and his guests at a diplomatic reception. All three were universally established, critically acclaimed and uncontroversial enough to be performers at the East Room – but they were the exceptions.

The great classical singer Marian Anderson (born in 1897), hailed by Arturo Toscanini as ‘a voice in a million’, was one of the earliest trailblazers. The daughter of an ice and coal vendor at Philadelphia and Reading Railroad’s Terminal Station first performed at the White House in 1936 at a party in honour of Circuit Court of Appeals Judge William Denman and his wife Leslie Van Ness. Three years later, she was to headline an Easter concert to raise funds for the black college, Howard University. There was enormous public interest, so the university searched for a venue that could accommodate a large crowd. The organisers approached Constitution Hall, then owned by the Daughters of the American Revolution. Like many other concert halls, restaurants and businesses of the time, the hall imposed rules of segregation on artists and audiences, and only permitted white artists to perform. (Albert Einstein provided Anderson with lodgings when she toured, as she was unable to stay in hotels due to the Jim Crow legislation.) The First Lady, Eleanor Roosevelt, a committed supporter of theatre and the performing arts, and champion of racial tolerance, was disgusted by the decision to refuse permission for Constitution Hall to be used and resigned from the organisation in protest. The President intervened and arranged for the Lincoln Memorial to be used for Anderson’s benefit concert. Over 75,000 people attended, and it was broadcast live on radio, securing Marian Anderson’s status as one of the most famous black singers of the era and resulting in a life-long friendship with the First Lady. It was not until Michelle Obama took up residency that a First Lady would repeat history and go out of her way to welcome black artists into the house that slaves had built.

The one genre of black music that had protected status in the ceremonies of state was gospel, or what for a time was known as ‘negro spirituals’. In his 1903 collection of essays, The Souls of Black Folk, the socialist intellectual and historian W. E. B. Du Bois wrote that ‘despite caricature and defilement’, the music of the black church ‘remains the most original and beautiful expression of human life and longing yet born on American soil’. Songs like ‘Amazing Grace’, ‘Precious Lord, Take My Hand’ and the black national anthem ‘Lift Every Voice And Sing’ are still sung at funerals, ceremonial openings and presidential inaugurations. As Mahalia Jackson commented: ‘Blues are the songs of despair, but gospel songs are the songs of hope.’ They also had another abiding strength because they fulsomely praised the Lord and were unlikely to offend even the most upright citizen.

The pervasive power of gospel music is that it delivers ritual and ceremony and casts an imperious gaze over congregations from the rural Baptist churches of the Deep South to the grand cathedrals of the major northern cities and to highly choreographed state occasions like funerals and inaugurations. For all its factionalism, Christianity exerts a pervasive power over America whether it is the fundamentalism of white segregationists or the raucous marches for civil rights. The unifying symbolism of gospel is immense. Mahalia Jackson sang at President Kennedy’s inauguration in 1961, the African American mezzo-soprano Denyce Graves sang ‘The Lord’s Prayer’ at the funeral of Ronald Reagan, and, most recently, as a statement of towering modernity, the Queen of Soul, Aretha Franklin, sang ‘My Country, ’Tis Of Thee’ at Barack Obama’s inauguration.

In July 2020, in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, a ceremony for the late congressman and civil rights leader John Lewis was held in the Capitol rotunda. US lawmakers, masked and dressed in black, wept when Wintley Phipps delivered his melodramatic rendition of ‘Amazing Grace’. He had performed for a long line of American presidents including Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama.

The story of black music and the White House is one of gradual change and, eventually, one of accommodating even the excommunicated. The journey from spiritual song to secular soul music took decades to complete, and as soul evolved into funk and new forms of urban dance, the doors were rarely open. As the twentieth century unfolded, soul left the church to embrace sexuality, psychedelia, street politics, afro-futurism and the hedonism of underground disco. Then it came under the influence of different regional expressions such as New York hip-hop, Washington go-go, Chicago house and Detroit techno, and once again was out on a limb. Many of the most innovative practitioners were far removed from conventional electoral politics and thus considered too unruly, too militant and too sexual to be invited into the mainstream. Obama changed that.

Hip-hop, the most successful and disruptive prodigy of black music, tested the White House to the limit. For many years during the Republican administrations of the eighties, hip-hop was perceived as the enemy within, a metaphor for some of society’s problems such as poverty, gang violence, crack cocaine and criminality. Although previous presidents and their political fixers were comfortable with gospel and the spiritual celebration of life and death, contemporary black music was anathema to most of them – too black and too strong. Rappers would have to wait for the arrival of the Obamas before they could enter the White House, and even then, the unwritten rules of engagement were tightly monitored.

Chicago looms large in the story of soul music and politics, and it was poetic justice that, on 4 November 2008, president-elect Barack Obama gave his now-historic victory speech in the city where his wife had been born and he had built his career. Obama looked out on a cold dark night to an estimated audience of a quarter of a million people packed into and around Grant Park. Conscious of the life-expectancy of presidents across the years, Obama was protected by bullet-proof glass to deflect any shots from the skyscrapers overlooking the park. Security was tight throughout, but the queues waiting to be frisked and the heavy police presence did not dampen the excitement of a crowd that had come to witness history: the first speech from the first black president.

So much hope was invested in Obama that night, that it is difficult to imagine any subsequent president engaging with the people so directly. The African American writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, former Howard University student and national correspondent for The Atlantic, wrote powerfully of the feelings that Obama’s victory had unlocked. ‘It now seemed possible,’ he wrote, ‘that white supremacy, the scourge of American history, might well be banished in my lifetime. In those days I imagined racism as a tumour that could be isolated and removed from the body of America, not as a pervasive system both native and essential to that body.’ From that perspective, it seemed possible that the success of one man really could change history. The expectation was unprecedented and ultimately flawed.

It was clear from the outset that Obama was soul music’s president. He took to the stage with his family to the song that had almost become his imprimatur, Stevie Wonder’s ‘Signed, Sealed, Delivered (I’m Yours)’ (Tamla, 1970), a buoyant Motown love song co-written by Lee Garrett who, like Wonder, is blind. The song was played nightly at rallies across America and exemplified the upbeat momentum of Obama’s campaign. During the primaries, Stevie Wonder had toured with him to Indiana to perform at a promotional concert. As Obama’s bid for the presidency gathered pace, it changed from a love song into a statement of intent, of national engagement and, finally, of elected office. The song was so embedded within the campaign that David Axelrod, Obama’s political strategist, had it as the ringtone on his phone.

‘It’s been a long time coming,’ Obama told the Grant Park crowd, channelling a line from the iconic civil rights song ‘A Change Is Gonna Come’, by one of Chicago’s most famous singers, Sam Cooke. ‘But tonight, because of what we did on this date in this election at this defining moment, change has come to America.’

On the morning after the election result, an Obama supporter in Harlem joyfully holds up the front page of the Daily News. The headline channels the title of Sam Cooke’s civil rights anthem of 1964.

‘A Change Is Gonna Come’ was released as an album track in 1964, the year the Civil Rights Act ended segregation in public places and banned employment discrimination based on race, colour, religion, sex or national origin. Sam Cooke’s younger brother, the one-time gospel singer L. C. Cooke, was watching the event on television at home when Obama quoted the line. He told the Chicago Tribune of the surge of pride he felt that his family had played such a part in Obama’s election. Sam and L. C. were toddlers when their mother took them on a Greyhound bus from Mississippi to their new home in Chicago in the early thirties. They were part of the Great Migration, which brought more than six million African Americans north from the segregated rural South. Half a million of the hopeful migrants settled in Chicago, mostly in the teeming South Side, a few miles south of where Obama now stood. Sam Cooke’s father was a minister: four of his six children sang in a group called the Singing Children, and the teenage brothers sang together in the famous gospel group, the Highway Q.C.’s. Now, Obama was in their neighbourhood, quoting from their songs.

‘A Change Is Gonna Come’ was written after an incident in which Cooke and his entourage were turned away when they arrived at a whites-only Holiday Inn in Shreveport, Louisiana, despite having made reservations. Cooke protested and was arrested for disturbing the peace. For Obama, the song served as a powerful shorthand: ‘Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time,’ he told his audience. ‘We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.’

A gathering of local politicians and councilmen from Cook County sat in a shielded area off to the side of the stage. Among them was the legendary soul singer Jerry Butler, the former lead singer of the Impressions. He had co-written ‘I’ve Been Loving You Too Long’ with Otis Redding when the two were holed up in a hotel in Buffalo, New York, during a break in a concert tour. When Butler’s recording career waned in the early eighties, he began to pursue an interest in local politics. His sister Mattie was a leading community activist in Chicago and had been involved in the ‘arson for profit’ scandals, in which crooked entrepreneurs bought up insurance on old buildings in the Woodlawn neighbourhood only to burn them down and sell the vacant land at a profit. One night in October 1980, a series of fires broke out in Woodlawn, one of which claimed the lives of thirteen children two doors away from Mattie’s home. Having seen his sister at work and been inspired by Harold Washington’s election as Chicago’s first black mayor in 1983, Jerry Butler stood for election himself. By the time Obama staged his victory rally, Butler was the longest-serving member of the Cook County Board, serving as chair of the Health and Hospitals Committee. The two men had met when Obama first arrived in Chicago and was working for the Developing Communities Project, driving voter registration campaigns in the city’s Altgeld Gardens housing projects.

In Grant Park, by now jam-packed, the crowds cascading over the South Loop erupted. The opening bars of Jackie Wilson’s ‘(Your Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher And Higher’ soared into the night air. Butler smiled at the euphoria that greeted the song. Both the soul anthems that Obama had chosen to energise the crowd owed their origins to the streets of Chicago’s South Side and a remarkable square mile of music history that lay only five minutes away on Record Row, where a cluster of independent record labels had lined the blocks just south of Michigan Avenue. On the 2100 block, one of the most famous record labels in the story of African American music once had their offices. Chess Records was the label that connected the blues of John Lee Hooker, Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy Waters to the sixties soul of the Dells and the Radiants. Nearby were the offices of the Cincinnati indie label, King Records, who had James Brown on their roster, and further south were three venues that occupied a starring role in the story of sixties soul: the Regal Theater, the Peyton Place Club and Billy Taylor’s High Chaparral. It was in these few square miles that some of the most galvanising civil rights anthems were written and recorded, including ‘Move On Up’ by Curtis Mayfield, and ‘People Get Ready’ and ‘We’re A Winner’ by the Impressions.

The backing track for Jackie Wilson’s global hit ‘(Your Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher And Higher’ was recorded on 6 July 1967 at Columbia’s studios in Chicago, the product of a corridor of creativity that stretched from there to the other major city of soul: Detroit. The song was produced by Carl Davis and the recording session, arranged by Sonny Sanders, featured the legendary Motown backing band the Funk Brothers, including bassist James Jamerson, drummer Richard ‘Pistol’ Allen, guitarist Robert White and keyboardist Johnny Griffith. The Motown house band often moonlighted on sessions in Chicago to augment the low wages they were paid back in Detroit.

Jackie Wilson had grown up in Detroit’s Highland Park neighbourhood where he was a teenage recruit to the Detroit Shakers street gang. His alcoholic father was unemployed and persistently absent from home, and his parents separated when he was nine. Wilson dropped out of high school at the age of 15 and was twice sentenced to detention for fighting and knife crimes. His delinquent days were lived out at a time of deep-seated poverty and youth crime. Wilson’s teenage life had been described by John F. Kennedy’s Assistant Secretary of Labor, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, in the controversial ‘Moynihan Report: The Negro Family, the Case for National Action’ in 1965. It described a ‘destructive vein in ghetto culture’, a kind of urban youthquake that undermined inner-city life. Between 1960 and 1976, the number of juveniles apprehended increased by 416 per cent, and in Michigan, juveniles under the age of 17 accounted for 33 per cent of the state’s crime reports – and that was before the impact of the ‘War on Drugs’ legislation introduced by Presidents Nixon and Reagan. When Wilson returned to the streets after his second stint in detention, he got married and began to sing at the Sensation Club in Detroit, joining local supergroup the Falcons, his first real step on the ladder to success. He came to personify the slicker elements of sixties soul with his dynamic dance moves, virtuoso singing and impeccable dress sense. Wilson was a womaniser and was arrested on ‘moral charges’ in South Carolina in March 1967 after he and his drummer Jimmy Smith were discovered in a motel room in South Carolina with two 24-year-old white women. (At that time, interracial sex was such an emotive subject that, after pressure from his overbearing father, President Kennedy banned Sammy Davis Jr from appearing at his inaugural concert – Davis had recently married a white Swedish woman, May Britt.)

Michelle Obama’s upbringing was in stark contrast to the horrors sketched out in the Moynihan Report and the chaotic lifestyle experienced by Jackie Wilson. When Chicago soul came of age in the sixties, she was an infant, the daughter of Fraser and Marian Robinson who lived on the upper floor of 7436 South Euclid Avenue on the South Side. Fraser was a pump operator for the Chicago Water Department, and despite being diagnosed with multiple sclerosis at a young age, he rarely missed a day of work. Marian was a homeworker who raised Michelle and her older brother Craig in a hugely supportive family environment, with piano lessons, dedicated hours for school homework and encouragement to go to university. Michelle attended Whitney Young High School at the same time as her friend Santita Jackson, the oldest daughter of civil rights leader and two-time presidential candidate, Jesse Jackson, and later a backing singer for Roberta Flack. Santita was the Maid of Honour at Michelle’s marriage to Barack Obama and sang the national anthem at Bill Clinton’s second presidential inauguration.

Although there were exceptions – notably James Brown – the vast majority of sixties soul singers who recorded in the northern cities of Chicago and Detroit tilted towards the Democrats, and in the case of Motown, there was an unwritten rule that staff should support the Democrats during elections, on the campaign trail and at fundraisers. Jesse Jackson’s family and the Obamas led close and interconnected lives. The first time Obama ran for national office, he made sure he was not stepping on the ambitions of Jesse L. Jackson Jr, the son who later became a co-chairman of his 2008 presidential campaign. Although he was not from Chicago, Obama learned to love the city after his move there in the eighties: it became his home, his ’hood and his political turf. He worked his way through college with scholarships and student loans, and became involved with a group of churches to help rebuild community spirit in areas devastated by deindustrialisation before attending law school, becoming the first African American president of the Harvard Law Review. After graduation, he returned to Chicago to lead voter registration drives and work as an intern. Michelle Robinson – ‘the woman who put the “O” in Obama’ – met him in the summer of 1989 at the law firm Sidley & Austin, where she was already an associate. On their first date, they saw the Spike Lee film Do the Right Thing at the cinema and then went for ice cream at a Baskin-Robbins in Hyde Park – pure rom-com material. A plaque was put up in the spot where they first kissed, and it has since become a gathering place for young lovers.

Neither Barack nor Michelle had much money, and Michelle remembers driving around the South Side in a car that was ‘so rusted out, I could actually see the pavement going by through a hole in the passenger-side door’. The couple married in 1992 at the United Church of Christ in Chicago. Michelle’s brother Craig walked her down the aisle, and Barack’s brother Malik was best man. Their first dance was to one of soul music’s most majestic love songs, Stevie Wonder’s prophetic ‘You And I (We Can Conquer The World)’, from his 1972 album Talking Book. Their honeymoon was a road trip round California, taking in places like Big Sur, Napa and San Francisco.

Although he had the support of the Democratic Party, Obama had precious few corporate donors to draw upon and he had maxed-out his credit cards to attend conventions. So, he set about building a broad grassroots movement from his Chicago base, raising money through micro-donations, crowdfunding and social media. There would be glamorous nights to come, but only a few months out from the 2008 election he was still leaning on the support of Chicago’s lower-profile soul music community. On a Friday in July, only months before election day, his core local support crowded into the Park West concert venue on West Armitage to see R&B veteran Otis Clay, who had last grazed success ten years before, when his single ‘The Only Way Is Up’ was covered by Yaz and the Plastic People. By comparison with the big presidential fundraisers, the $100 ticket price on the night was paltry, but from the moment Obama clinched the Democratic nomination, black musicians were increasingly warming to him. Rappers Young Jeezy and Nas recorded ‘My President’, paying tribute to a blue Lamborghini and the future president with the slogan ‘My president is black, my Lambo’s blue’. ‘My President’ joined ‘(Your Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher And Higher’ and ‘Signed, Sealed, Delivered (I’m Yours)’ as a campaign song and, although it was never officially endorsed because of its flagrant use of the word ‘nigga’, it was often nodded into playlists as the campaign gathered momentum.

Obama fought off a compulsive tendency in his campaigning days, sticking wherever possible to familiar routines and rituals. In 2008, as his campaign intensified, he maintained a laser-like focus by playing Miles Davis’s ‘Freddie Freeloader’ repeatedly while writing speeches and pacing backstage. Obama reached the White House with 52.9 per cent of the vote, buoyed by a tantalising sense of hope, an innovative use of social media and a targeted system of statistical analysis that dug beneath the surface to uncover the nuances of what people were really thinking. He had built a partnership with his running mate, Senator Joe Biden of Delaware, as a safe bet, to counteract any perception of riskiness with the electorate. The most memorable poster of his presidential campaign was designed by the street artist Frank Shepard Fairey, skateboarder and founder of the Obey clothing brand. It depicted a stencilled image of Obama with the word ‘Hope’ in block capitals. What began as street art was quickly picked up by Obama’s savvy campaign team and turned into an electoral icon.

By the time of his re-election, he finally shook off his dependence on the Miles Davis track and moved on to a new compulsion, hitting replay on Jay-Z’s ‘My 1st Song’. The song, which featured the voice of Biggie Smalls, had a ‘keep your eyes on the prize’ message and gave Obama an inner resolve for the increasingly disruptive events to come.

Among his proudest presidential achievements – the one that resonated most powerfully with his home base in Chicago – was what is dubbed the Till Bill. In December 2016, Obama sat at his desk in the Oval office and signed the Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Reauthorization Crime Act, an Act of Congress introduced by the late John Lewis in 2007 that allowed cold cases of suspected violent crimes committed against African Americans before 1970 to be reopened. For Obama, signing the bill into law was honouring a promise he had made to many residents of Chicago as he worked his way to the White House.

Emmet Till, a high-spirited teenager, was a member of a gospel group from Summit-Argo, Illinois, who frequently appeared on stage in amateur contests against Jerry Butler and Curtis Mayfield in Chicago’s Cabrini-Green. Till was murdered in the Delta town of Money, Mississippi, in 1955 during a summer vacation spent visiting relatives. It was claimed that he had flirted with a white woman at a local grocery store. Several nights later, the woman’s relatives abducted the teenager and subjected him to torture before dumping his body in the Tallahatchie River.

Simeon Booker, the Washington bureau chief of Jet and Ebony magazines, was in Chicago when he heard of the boy’s disappearance. He earned the trust of Emmett’s mother, Mamie, and accompanied her to the funeral home, where she insisted on seeing her son’s body as it was removed from a rubber bag. At Mamie’s request, Jet carried a series of photographs of her son’s disfigured face, turning his death into a cause célèbre for civil rights.

Historian David Halberstam has since described the photographs, published at the height of the trial of Emmett’s killers, as ‘the first great media event of the civil rights movement’; in Chicago, the Reverend Jesse Jackson called it the movement’s ‘Big Bang’, an issue of savage social injustice that all reasonable people could rally around; and John Lewis later said, ‘Emmett Till was my George Floyd.’ Crammed in between features on the top musical acts of the time – Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Nat King Cole and Bo Diddley – were some of the most disturbing documentary photographs ever committed to print. ‘Mutilated is the word most often used to describe the face of Emmett Till after his body was hauled out of the Tallahatchie River in Mississippi,’ reported The New York Times. ‘Inhuman is more like it: melted, bloated, missing an eye, swollen so large that its patch of wiry hair looks like that of a balding old man, not a handsome, brazen 14-year-old boy.’

At A. A. Raynor’s morgue on Roosevelt Road, tens of thousands of people filed past the open casket to pay their respects. It was a gruesome awakening that brought rage to the streets of Chicago and ignited the civil rights movement. An all-white jury acquitted the killers, but in a magazine feature in January 1956, the pair confessed. Almost every conversation about civil rights and racist violence in Chicago returned to Emmet Till, and, although the atrocity took place six years before Obama was born in Honolulu, he heard the story repeated hundreds of times and grew to understand its potency and significance to the people of Chicago.

One of the people who spoke to him frequently about the murder was a dynamo by the name of Willie Barrow, a mentor to the future president and an influence on his attitudes towards minority communities. Known as ‘the Little Warrior’, Barrow was a tiny woman with a long and unimpeachable pedigree in the civil rights movement. She was only 12 years old when she led her first demonstration to demand the right to travel on a school bus in her home of Burton, Texas, during the Great Depression. After high school she worked as a welder at the Kaiser Shipyards in Swan Island, Washington, much like the mythical Rosie the Riveter, and also became ordained as a minister. She moved to Chicago after the war. Barrow journeyed to the March on Washington in 1963 and south to the famous march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, in 1965, where marchers were beaten back by law enforcers at the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Like the Reverend Jesse Jackson, she was part of the Chicago branch of Martin Luther King’s movement, helping to set up his northern offices there. Together with Jackson, she also co-founded Operation PUSH, the community organisation, and managed the itinerary of the Operation Breadbasket Orchestra and Choir, a remarkable coalition of musicians who toured America raising funds for civil rights campaigns. The orchestra was led by the great Memphis saxophonist Ben Branch, the last person to speak to Martin Luther King in the minutes before he was assassinated at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, in 1968.

Barrow effectively ‘adopted’ Obama when he moved to Chicago and considered him her godson. On her death in 2015, Obama spoke lovingly of her inspiring personality: ‘Reverend Willie T. Barrow was a Civil Rights icon and a Chicago institution, a ‘Little Warrior’ in pursuit of justice for all God’s children . . . To Michelle and me, she was a constant inspiration, a lifelong mentor, and a very dear friend. I was proud to count myself among the more than 100 men and women she called her ‘Godchildren,’ and worked hard to live up to her example. I still do.’

What Obama did not mention was the event that changed Willie Barrow’s life and how it would come to affect his own political prospects. Willie Barrow had one child, a boy called Keith, who was born in 1954. As a teenager, he followed in the footsteps of the great Chicago gospel stars who were breaking away from the church to embrace secular soul. Like Sam Cooke (of the Soul Stirrers), Jerry Butler and Curtis Mayfield (of the Northern Jubilee Gospel Singers) and Major Lance (of the Five Gospel Harmonaires), Barrow was a chorister who went solo. He began singing at Vernon Park Church of God on East 77th Street where his mother was a pastor, but soon set up a secular group, the Soul Shakers. After recording a solo gospel album for Jewel Records, with sleeve notes by the Reverend Jesse Jackson, he signed a solo deal with Columbia/ CBS. To progress his career, Keith Barrow moved to New York, where he became a well-known figure in the city’s underground dance clubs including David Mancuso’s the Loft, the Paradise Garage, the Saint and the Gallery. He immersed himself in the burgeoning disco scene and enjoyed some success with the Top 50 R&B hit ‘Teach Me (It’s Something About Love)’ (Columbia, 1977) and the elegant dance record ‘Turn Me Up’ (Columbia, 1978).

While touring Europe, Barrow fell ill in Paris and rang his mother in Chicago, worried that he was too unfit to go on stage. He was admitted to hospital in France, the tour was cancelled, and Barrow was flown back to Chicago where he was cared for by his mother before his death from AIDS in October 1983. He is buried in Oak Woods Cemetery near the family home in Chicago’s South Side.

Driven by her son’s death, Willie Barrow had a shift of conscience. She reorientated the PUSH movement towards what eventually became known as intersectionality – the understanding that people are often disadvantaged by multiple sources of oppression: race, class, gender identity, sexual orientation and religion. The famous civil rights organisation was eventually rebranded as Rainbow/PUSH, focusing on minorities across the spectrum. It was one of a network of organisations that supported Obama and extended his appeal beyond the mainstream movement.

From Willie Barrow, Obama learned the need to reach out beyond the African American community in which his wife had grown up and that he had adopted as his own. Arguably, Obama’s greatest gift is that he is a conceptual thinker who sees the world as one of ever-changing complexity. Unlike many other presidents, Obama rarely gave in to superficiality. ‘Issues are never simple,’ he once said. ‘One thing I’m proud of is that very rarely will you hear me simplify the issues.’

The critic Ta-Nehisi Coates saw something else in Obama’s approach to the presidency that went beyond political crowd-pleasing. He described a set of cultural cues, sometimes predicated on soul music, which became an important part of his popular appeal: ‘Obama doesn’t merely evince blackness; he uses his blackness to court African Americans, semaphoring in a cultural dialect of our creation – crooning Al Green at the Apollo, name-checking Young Jeezy, regularly appearing on the cover of black magazines, weighing the merits of Jay-Z versus Kanye West, being photographed in the White House with a little black boy touching his hair.’ Although Coates acknowledges that some of these gestures tip into mawkish populism, he argues that they allowed Obama to reach out to people, to close the gap that often separates a president from ordinary citizens and create an immensely powerful bond. That self-confidence, which allowed him to clown around in the Oval Office and fist-bump janitors in the corridors of the White House, was endearing to those who liked him, although could irk those who didn’t.

As his presidency unfolded, Obama increasingly used music as a tool of emotional and ideological communication. Rolling Stone writer Ryan Bort saw it as an extension of his relaxed personality:

One of the charms of Obama’s time in office was his appreciation of popular music, especially anything with soul. During a 2012 campaign fundraiser at the Apollo Theater in Harlem, he famously sang a few bars of Al Green’s ‘Let’s Get Together’ . . . From 2009, when he sang Dionne Warwick’s ‘Walk On By’ during a Democratic rally in New Jersey, to 2016, when he chimed in – and then ultimately led – a performance of ‘What’d I Say’ during a White House tribute to Ray Charles, Obama was never shy about expressing himself through song.

Perhaps the most powerful occasion came in a deeper moment of reflection during the funeral of pastor and state senator Clementa C. Pinckney of South Carolina, who was assassinated by Dylann Roof in June 2015 when he opened fire in the Emanuel AME church in Charleston, killing nine of the congregation. Roof was a disenchanted white supremacist who harboured a bitter hatred of black people and hoped to spark a race war. He ranted on his arrest that he had no choice. He couldn’t ‘go into the ghetto and fight. I chose Charleston because it is the most historic city in my state, and at one time had the highest ratio of blacks to whites in the country. We have no skinheads, no real KKK, no one doing anything but talking on the internet.’ He awaits execution in Terre Haute, Indiana. At Pinckney’s funeral, after giving the eulogy, President Obama paused, bowed his head and seemed to call on an inner strength, then began to sing ‘Amazing Grace’. The voices of the mourners swelled up and supported him. It was an astonishing performance, heartfelt yet conscious of the watching millions.

Obama’s ability to engage effortlessly with people riled Republicans. Some of them called his Chicago connections into question, pointing out that he had not been born there but in a middle-class household in Hawaii. The implication was that there was something fraudulent about the man, an idea that was whipped into a national obsession – birtherism – that implied Obama wasn’t even American and should not therefore be president. Even after his presidency was over, the right wing of the Republican Party and the bitterly oppositional President Donald Trump railed against his identity. Fox News host Tucker Carlson accused Obama of giving ‘a divisive and deeply dishonest campaign speech’ in his eulogy at the funeral of John Lewis, then, in an old Republican trope, dismissed Obama’s ‘fake accent’ and called him ‘Mr Hawaii Guy’.

Barack Obama had moved to Chicago in June 1985 to become a community organiser and stayed for the best part of twenty-five years. He met his wife there, was married there and was elected to the Illinois State Senate in 1996. Until he became president, his entire political life was anchored in Chicago; it was politically dishonest to deny him the right to sing a Sam Cooke song or joke with young boys from the South Side. He might not have been born there, but he adopted the city with genuine passion.

Obama deployed elements like his love of soul music and his smooth oratorial style to gently nudge the American mainstream into accepting black people in positions of power and influence. Obama knew his history. He knew all about music’s journey from the dusty backroads of the blues to commercially successful contemporary R&B. More importantly, he understood that soul had always been the music of change. For rock critic Charlie Gillett, soul was ‘the sound of the city’ and for Motown it was ‘the sound of young America’, and then, as it evolved and diversified, for Ben E. King it became a music of extra dimensions – a ‘supernatural thing’. Soul music broke the rules of segregation, tore down the barriers to chart success and eventually came to dominate the mainstream. As recently as 1985, Prince had been a Beltway outcast, described as a peddler of filth and sexual promiscuity, and identified as a member of the notorious ‘Filthy Fifteen’, the list of artists that the Parents’ Music Resource Center (PMRC), founded by Vice President Al Gore’s wife Tipper, had identified as being unsuitable for American teenagers. By the time Prince died, the PMRC had folded, Al Gore was on the lecture circuit talking about global warming, and Prince was a global icon. Obama had opened the door of the White House to edgier talent. He understood hip-hop as a vibrant art form, articulate, popular in the streets and capable of a much broader range of emotions than hatred, misogyny and rage.

Obama’s presidency coincided with substantial technological change as streaming came to displace physical sales of compact discs and retro vinyl. It was Obama who metaphorically opened the doors of the White House to urban artists but that was, in part, enabled by his family. The First Lady had grown up enraptured by the great R&B female singers who had been born in Bronzeville and Hyde Park in her hometown, and, as her daughters Sasha and Malia grew into teenagers, they influenced their mother’s taste in music, which took in hip-hop, house and urban soul.

Black music in all its transgressive forms was knocking on the White House door, although in fairness to the outgoing president, George W. Bush, he had not been as tone deaf as many of his predecessors. Bush had proclaimed June 2001 ‘Black Music Month’, encouraging ‘all Americans to learn more about the contributions of black artists to America’s musical heritage and to celebrate their remarkable role in shaping our history and culture’. However, there was nothing new or disruptive about the performers invited to attend the launch; they were drawn largely from a ‘safe’ musical heritage – Lionel Hampton, Shirley Caesar, the Blind Boys of Alabama and the Harlem Jazz Museum Artists among them. Then, in October 2003, less than three years into Bush’s presidency, Beyoncé featuring Sean Paul topped the Billboard charts with ‘Baby Boy’. It was a significant moment: all the top selling singles that month were by African American artists. While Obama’s presidency seemed to directly reflect these seismic changes in the recording industry, they neither began nor ended with the first black president. By 2017 and the first year of the Trump presidency, the change had become even more measurable: hip-hop accounted for 20.9 per cent of all songs consumed by listeners, and that number jumped to an unprecedented 24.7 per cent in 2018. Nearly a quarter of all tracks listened to in the US came from the once outlawed and reviled genre of rap music, while mainstream rock, once the heartbeat of middle America, was waning. This was not just a shift in music tastes alone; it paralleled the changing dynamics and demographics of American society.

As part of his mission to signal change, Obama built up a close working relationship with Aretha Franklin, a woman whose life seemed to echo the developments that black America had experienced. A child of civil rights and a personification of a new kind of patriotism, Franklin brought a mature glamour to Obama’s inauguration, where she sported an ostentatious silver-bowed hat while singing the anthem, ‘My Country, ’Tis Of Thee’. This was a statement of Democratic continuity, in that Franklin had sung a medley of Duke Ellington hits for Jimmy Carter back in 1977 and performed at a pre-inauguration festival for Bill Clinton with Stevie Wonder and Diana Ross at the Lincoln Memorial in 1993.