A CELEBRATION OF MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR AND THE MUSIC OF THE DEEP SOUTH

Growing up in the deep South, I heard a lot of story-telling, on front porches, on the party-line, in kitchens, in beauty shops.   But the singing I heard (outside of church, I mean) was sung by our black neighbors and farm workers.  Background music, I grew up thinking of it, but when my friend, poet doris davenport, scolded me, saying, "We are tired of being background music for white people," I realized she was right, and more important, that I was wrong in thinking of that singing as "background music."  It was, as Evie Shockley sings in her poem, "a background in music. " 

On this day when we celebrate the life and words of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., I remember those voices, how their songs wove their way into my deepest self without my knowing it, and how I am still trying to learn how to harmonize with them.  

   Legato

.”..we sang everything there was to say.”

doris

                                             ---Evie Shockley

---a background in music  (from the new black, Wesleyan U.P.)

Evie

When the bell 

rang out noontime,

they lounged under oak trees
and drank from a mason jar

sweet tea    the taste

of a lemon slice lingering

at stovetops

and wash basins

cradles

and deathbeds

their voices kept

rising and falling 

like wind riffling 

cotton fields  

folding sheets

scrubbing floors,

spinning mayhaw juice

into a red thread

they were all the time

 singing

but we didn't listen

because it was backdrop

to what we sang

back ground

and ground back into

darkest leaf mold

that covered 

the root of our other

life     theirs

with which we never learned

how to harmonize.

Pembroke Magazine, 2012

With Doll, Patsy, and Lois, at a wedding celebration for Lois's son.