At the beginning of this month—Black History Month—I posed a question: “Teaching Black history is being banned. Will Black music be next?” My query is not far-fetched, given that it’s already happened in the past—multiple times—and for a variety of reasons.
Black musicians and songs they sang were barred from radio airplay, or from television broadcasts. The reasons: because of the progressive or radical politics of the singer, or because they pointed directly at the racism and white supremacy being enacted in our society. Or because the songs they sang were dubbed as too racy for popular white consumption. Some of those very same songs were later cleaned up and sanitized by white artists who were “safe” for white teen consumption—especially the white girls.
This is not to say that the only music that has been banned over time was made by Black artists—there are far too many examples of music censorship of artists of all backgrounds, which have been documented by groups like the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).
Black Music Sunday is a weekly series highlighting all things Black music. With nearly 150 stories (and counting) covering performers, genres, history, and more, each featuring its own vibrant soundtrack, I hope you’ll find some familiar tunes and perhaps an introduction to something new.
With its earthy language and frank lyrical approach to sex and violence, not to mention the racist society it was born into, the blues has been censored and vilified since day one
Although suppressing music in America can be traced back to the 1500s when slave owners forbade the use of “talking drums”, it was in the mid-20th century that censorship of music became systematic, controlled and organised. And no music has been subject to more controversy and more censorship than the blues.
In its various guises through time, as boogie-woogie, as R&B, as British blues and as rock’n’roll, the blues has been accused of corrupting the young, encouraging sexual depravity and inciting murder. In response, both external and internal forces worked to repress the blues, with it reaching a crescendo in the 1950s. The McCarthy-era United States were steeped in fear and intolerance. As blues and rock’n’roll took hold, censorship loomed large as the older generation fought to enforce morality and prevent the corruption of the youth.
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Few artists faced as much bigotry and censorship as Billie Holiday. As well as being both female and black, Holiday’s tough upbringing – including being put to work as a prostitute by her own mother aged just 13 – resulted in a dark songbook with distressing lyrics that white America wasn’t ready to hear. Her 1939 song Strange Fruit included the words ‘Black body swinging in the southern breeze/strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees’, in reference to the white south’s sport of lynching African Americans, an uncomfortable truth that America was not willing to acknowledge.
“An uncomfortable truth that America was not willing to acknowledge” … and is still not willing to acknowledge today.
RELATED: Here's what attacks on critical race theory are defending: History from a slaveholder's viewpoint
Given the intertwining of Holiday’s personal story and the subject of “Strange Fruit,” this song—and her delivery of it—is one of the most important moments in U.S. music history.
Here’s the original 1939 recording:
The blue scrolling text at the start of the video moves fast, so find it below:
Written originally as a poem, Abel Meeropol wrote & performed Strange Fruit to express his horror at lynchings. Barney Josephson of Cafe Society Nightclub in New York heard the song performed by Meeropol, his wife, & vocalist Laura Duncan & introduced it to Billie Holiday whom asked her label Columbia to record the song. Fearing a negative reaction due to the songs lyrics, they refused to record the song. She then asked friend Milt Gabler of Commodore Records & sang a cappella version to Gabler whom wept afterwards. Columbia gave Holiday a one-session release from her contract to record with Commodore. Because of the songs impact, Holiday was told to close all her shows with it. As the song was about to begin, waiters stopped serving, lights were turned off & a spotlight was focused on Holiday whom had her eyes closed, as if she were praying.
This chilling live performance from 1959, the year Holiday died, includes the lyrics on the screen.
Aida Amoako, writing for BBC Culture in 2019, asked if “Strange Fruit” is “the most shocking song of all time.”
What is so remarkable about Strange Fruit is how indelible a mark it made on American society so soon after its release. Samuel Grafton, a columnist for the New York Post, wrote of the song: “It will, even after the tenth hearing, make you blink and hold onto your chair. Even now, as I think of it, the short hair on the back of my neck tightens and I want to hit somebody. And I think I know who.”
Strange Fruit was not the first popular song to deal with race. Fats Waller’s Black and Blue had come out 10 years earlier, and Lead Belly recorded The Bourgeois Blues in the same month Holiday recorded Strange Fruit. But Strange Fruit stands out among protest songs for its graphic content and subsequent commercial success. Tad Hershorn, an archivist at the Rutgers Institute of Jazz Studies, tells BBC Culture: “It was such an in-your-face type of protest song [that it] really gained her fame outside of Harlem … it did really leave both the singer and the audience no place to hide.”
A call to arms
This bold confrontation helped galvanise a movement that would eventually alter the course of US history. Anti-lynching campaigners sent Strange Fruit to congressmen to encourage them to propose a viable anti-lynching bill. A review in Time Magazine referred to the song as “a prime piece of musical propaganda for the NAACP”. Ahmet Ertegun, who later co-founded Atlantic Records, called it “a declaration of war … the beginning of the civil rights movement”.
RELATED STORY: As long as white supremacy endures, Billie Holiday's 'Strange Fruit' will be an anthem of resistance
Over in the folk music genre, one performer’s life has spanned nearly a century, and he also faced censorship in his career. At the age of 95, Harry Belafonte has been a political activist for more decades than most people have been alive. His song “Don’t Stop the Carnival” was cut from the Smother’s Brothers Comedy Hour in September 1968.
Belafonte performed the song with video footage of the 1968 Democratic National Convention, including the anti-war protests and riots, playing in the background. The segment was banned from the show, which contributed to the show’s cancellation months later.
As blogger Ivan G, Shreve Jr. wrote on Thrilling Day’s of Yesteryear in 2011:
… one of my favorite “music videos” of all time—Harry Belafonte’s amazing rendition of Don’t Stop the Carnival as performed on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour in September 1968. It was a sequence that the show’s fans did not see until many years after its original airing because CBS objected to the content of the song (Belafonte cleverly mixes in a medley of his hits like Mama Look at Bubu and Jump in the Line while rewriting some of the song’s lyrics with overt political statements) and its visuals (footage of the chaos that went on during the 1968 Democratic Party Convention in Chicago), so they cut the piece and substituted a Q&A session with Tom and Dick (and Tom, clearly becoming more and more pissed off during the session, finally lets loose with an improvised editorial on censorship)
Watch the rescued clip below:
Belafonte was continuing the musical political protest tradition of artists banned from radio, including Paul Robeson, and folk singer Josh White.
RELATED STORY: In memory of Paul Robeson, the man whose voice they tried to silence
RELATED STORY: Josh White broke racial and music barriers, yet his politics nearly erased his legacy
Yet censorship and banning of music was not simply a matter of politics. In a 2014 article for VICE, “A Brief History of the Government Suppressing Music,” Paul Blest documents yet another effort to “cleanse” music—which also targeted Black artists.
In 1955, the “Juvenile Delinquency and Crime Commission” in Houston, Texas formed a subcommittee to “Wash Out The Air,” and came out with a list of 26 singles that were “suggestive, obscene, and characterized by lewd imitations” that would be banned not only from radio, but jukeboxes and even record stores within the city of Houston. As Linda Martin and Kerry Segrave wrote in Anti-Rock: The Opposition To Rock and Roll, almost all of the artists on the list were black, including Ray Charles, The Dominoes, and the Drifters. The group threatened to file complaints with the FCC if any of Houston’s radio stations didn’t comply, and eventually, all of them did.
Jim Shelley at The Woodstock Whisperer has more details in a 2016 story.
Finally on August 21, 1955, the Juvenile Delinquency and Crime Commission in Houston, Texas, claimed success in its anti-rock and roll crusade.
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All nine Houston radio stations had cooperated.
The Commission had prepared a list of objectionable records … almost all by black artists, including:
Ray Charles “I Got a Woman”
Clyde McPhatter “Whatcha’ Gonna Do Now”
Hank Ballard and the Midnighters “Annie Had a Baby”
Dominoes “Sixty Minute Man”
Drifters “Honey Love”
Roy Brown “Good Rockin’ Tonight”
The Commission told radio station owners that the Commission would complain to the Federal Communications Commission if the stations did not cooperate.
Ugh. Please don’t tell Ted Cruz and Greg Abbott—or their Florida brother-in-racism Ron DeKlantis—about this.
Let’s check out all six of the tunes listed above—be sure to take note of which one corrupts you the most, and tell me in the comments. 😜
Jacob Utti, writing for American Songwriter in 2021, went “Behind The Song.”
One of the artist’s most famous hit songs was the salacious “I Got a Woman,” which he released in 1954 as a single (with the B-side being his gut-wrenching tune, “Come Back Baby”). And both songs appeared on his 1957 self-titled record, which was later renamed, Hallelujah I Love Her So. But Charles told Pop Chronicles before he died that he was playing “I Got a Woman” for about a year before recording it.
Charles recorded the track on November 18, 1954, in the Atlanta studios of the Georgia Tech radio station WGST. The song became his first hit, climbing to No. 1 on the R&B chart in January 1955. Rooted in gospel sounds, the song is steeped in what Charles was listening to at the time while on the road in the hot summer of 1954. Charles wrote the track with his bandleader Renald Richard.
It was the combination of church sounds with secular lyrics that made the songwriter famous. It was his soul music, and some say the first-ever soul music. “I Got a Woman” was built on the tune “It Must Be Jesus” by the band the Southern Tones, as well as a bridge inspired by the song “Living on Easy Street” by Big Bill Broonzy.
Utti infers that the woman on the other side of town who Charles is singing about is white—which of course was a great reason to ban the song.
Moving on to Clyde McPhattter and the Drifters, courtesy of their iMDB biography, written by MIchael Z. Gordon—which also teases another song on the “Wash Out the Air” list that we’ll get to in a moment:
Clyde McPhatter was born in Durham, NC, on November 15, 1932, one of six children. The McPhatters moved to New York City in late 1950 and McPhatter,. after singing for a few years with gospel groups, joined Billy Ward's Dominoes.
The Dominoes signed with King Records in 1950 and recorded the chart-topping "Sixty Minute Man" with McPhatter singing the lead vocals. That song was the biggest R&B hit of 1951 and the first by a black group to cross over from the R&B to the pop charts. McPhatter stayed with the group for three years, singing such hits as "Have Mercy Baby", "The Bells," "I'd Be Satisfied". However, Ward had his name as top billing and collected all of the profits, while McPhatter wasn't earning enough to live on from the small amount of money that Ward paid him. Finally, in early 1953, McPhatter decided to quit.
Atlantic Records approached him with an offer to record his own group, eventually named The Drifters. As the group's leader McPhatter racked up a number of hits, beginning with "Money Honey"--which became the biggest R&B hit of 1954--"Such a Night," "Honey Love," "White Christmas" and "What'cha Gonna Do." McPhatter had already made a decision to leave The Drifters, as he saw himself moving toward a solo career. His voice was so dominant that it took five years for the Drifters to recover after he left.
I guess the lyrics “We're gonna reel, gonna reel, gonna roll gonna roll, gonna dance, drink, have a ball” or perhaps “Let's huckabuck some more” were feared to inspire wild behaviors. Scandalous!
As for Hank Ballard and the Midnighters, from the Daily Do-Wop:
Hank Ballard was one of the first rock n’ roll artists to emerge in the early 1950s. His group Hank Ballard & the Midnighters helped to pioneer the rhythm and blues genre. Their big hit “Work With Me, Annie” had racy lyrics, which caused a Los Angeles disc jockey to joke that there would be a follow-up record called “Annie Had A Baby.” Their label, King Records, received orders for the non-existent record. The song, written by Henry Glover and Lois Mann, was recorded and released to fill those orders, and it went all the way to #1 on the R&B Chart in 1954. There was also another answer song “Annie’s Aunt Fannie.”
Here’s the banned “Annie Had a Baby”:
In 2016, NPR’s Fresh Air invited music historian Ed Ward to discuss “The Rocking, Rollicking R&B Of Billy Ward And His Dominoes.” The segment interspersed clips of the Dominoes’ music, as this transcript excerpt indicates.
ED WARD: Billy Ward was born Robert Williams and showed musical talent from an early age. He was initially inclined toward classical music, which he composed as a teenager and also during his studies at the Juilliard School of Music in New York. But there wasn't much chance for a black composer then, and as he coached young vocalists, he and his friend Rose Marks decide that a vocal group that could go back and forth between pop and rhythm and blues might work. They held auditions and The Dominoes were born. Billy did the arrangements and played piano and organ and Rose did the business end. Soon,they signed with King Records' subsidiary Federal and did their first recording session on November, 14, 1950.
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WARD: Their lead singer was Clyde McPhatter who'd sneaked out of his gospel group to try his luck at amateur night at Harlem's famed Apollo Theater where Ward may have seen him. McPhatter was only 17 when he recorded "Do Something For Me," although he turned 18 the next day. But the group's first smash had a different lead vocalist, their bass singer Bill Brown.
BILLY WARD AND THE DOMINOES: (Singing) Sixty-minute man, sixty-minute man. Look a here girls, I'm telling you now, they call me loving Dan. I'll rock them, roll them all night long. I'm a sixty-minute man. If you don't believe I'm all I say, come up and take my hand. When I let you go, you'll cry, oh,yes, he's a sixty-minute man. There'll be 15 minutes of kissing ...
WARD: "Sixty Minute Man" raced up the rhythm and blues charts and stayed there for a couple of months. It was also probably the first off-color black hit to sell two white teenagers, and it's worth noting loving Dan's reference to rocking and rolling. If Billy Ward is remembered for anything,it's his strict rules for The Dominoes - not only fines for the usual showing up late, messy clothes and so on, but there would be no smoking or drinking and each member of the group was required to drink a glass of warm milk before bedtime. As a result, the group changed personnel fairly regularly.
Have a listen to “Sixty Minute Man”—Loving Dan’s pitch to all the unsatisfied ladies out there runs less than 150 seconds long.
Jessica Griggs at Dusty Old Thing wrote about “Honey Love” in a collection of “Surprising Songs That Were Banned In The 1950s”— “it” wasn’t just banned in Houston.
This song, performed by The Drifters, was not only banned from the radio, it actually instigated several police raids in Memphis. The cops raided dozens of local establishments in order to confiscate the record before it could be played on the jukebox. Granted, the lyrics probably suggest exactly what authorities feared… namely, [with] the use of “it.” (“I need it… when the moon is bright/in the middle of the night/when the lights are low/just before you go”), but was it necessary for police to raid Memphis? Apparently so.
It’s absolutely clear what “it” means here.
The final tune we’ll visit from Houston authorities’ “Wash Out the Air” initiative is Roy Brown’s “Good Rockin’ Tonight,” which was cut in 1947—the year I was born. Though it is classified as “jump blues,” there are many music historians who dub it one of the earliest “rock and roll” tunes.
From Brown’s bio at All About Blues Music:
Roy Brown was born in New Orleans in 1925, and grew up in Louisiana and Texas but moved to Los Angeles when his mother died in 1942. His vocal skills were honed in Church, but Roy was keen on becoming a boxer and fought as a welterweight, although he was rejected for Military service on account of his flat feet!
Roy won a singing contest, then moved to Galveston, Texas, where he fronted a band and started to play some Blues. When he wrote a song called 'Good Rockin' Tonight', he tried to get his idol Wynonie Harris to record it, but he didn't take it up. In June 1947, Roy went to Cosimo Matassa's J&M studio across from Congo Square in New Orleans, and he emerged with his own version of 'Good Rockin' Tonight', which put his Gospel vocals over a driving rhythm and "talked a little dirty", making it a prime candidate to be a rock'n'roll anthem.
It got some airplay on 'white' radio stations, and the local 'black' stations, especially 'Poppa Stoppa's Show', played it almost non-stop, and Roy's version reached No.13 in the R&B charts. Wynonie Harris finally recognised a 'good thing' and his version went to No.1 in the following year, and Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis, Ricky Nelson and Bruce Springsteen have all had success with Roy's composition.
Give that “good thing” a listen.
Since “rockin” or “rockin’ and rollin’” was widely considered to be a euphemism for the sex act, Brown’s lyrics likely set him up for the ban.
Well I heard the news, there's good rockin' tonight
Oh I'm gonna hold my baby as tight as I can
Tonight she'll know I'm a mighty, mighty man
I heard the news, there's good rockin' tonight
Oh yes I heard the news, there's good rockin' tonight
Oh I'm gonna hold my baby as tight as I can
Tonight she'll know I'm a mighty, mighty man
I heard the news, there's good rockin' tonight
Oh meet me in a hurry behind the barn
Don't be afraid I'll do you no harm
I want you to bring my rocking shoes
'Cause tonight I'm gonna rock away all my blues
I heard the news, there's good rockin' tonight
Oh yes I heard the news, there's good rockin' tonight
Oh I'll hold my baby as tight as I can
Tonight she'll know I'm a mighty, mighty man
I heard the news, there's good rockin' tonight
Well Deacon Jones and Melville Brown
Two of the slickest cats in town
They'll be there, just a wait and see
Stomping and jumping at the jamboree
Ah hey man, there's a good rockin' tonight
Well sweet Lorraine, Sioux City Sue
Sweet Georgia Brown, Caldonia too
They'll all be there shouting like mad
Hoy sister, hoy sister, ain't you glad
We heard the news, there's good rockin' tonight
Oh yes, we'll rock tonight
Hey hey, we'll rock tonight
Hoy hoy, we'll rock tonight
Hey hey, we'll rock tonight
I heard the news, there's a good rockin' tonight
Join me in the comments to continue rockin’ and rollin’—and celebrating freedom of music both on our airwaves and in our ear buds. And remember: Though Black History Month may be celebrated for just 28 days each year, Black history is American history, all year ‘round.