Today is the 26th day of Black History Month. I tend to use this time as a way to remind readers – and everyone else of a couple of important facts:
- You can’t love Black artists and their work, and not see them as people
- Black lives — and Black art matters
- Black culture is American culture
So as we go through the month, I’m going to talk about a collection of Black artists. It’ll be fairly comprehensive and eclectic list — although it won’t be a complete list.
So far I’ve mentioned the following artists:
- Patti LaBelle
- Rick James
- John Lee Hooke
- Janet Jackson
- Aretha Franklin
- Chaka Khan
- Sister Rosetta Tharpe
- Curtis Mayfield
- Bob Marley
- J. Dilla
- De La Soul
- Ella Fitzgerald
- Dionne Warwick
- Grace Jones
- Whitney Houston
- Louis Armstrong
- A Tribe Called Quest
- Maceo Parker
- Nina Simone
- Marvin Gaye
- George Clinton and Parliament Funkadelic
- John Coltrane
- Miles Davis
- Erykah Badu
- The Supremes
- Al Green
- KRS One
- Sharon Jones and The Dap Kings
- Queen Latifah
Today, I wanted to celebrate the legendary Cab Calloway. Calloway’s work has been massive influential on later generations of performers including James Brown, Michael Jackson, Janet Jackson — and importantly on hip-hop. There’s an argument that Calloway was one of the first ever recorded rappers, ever, In some way that isn’t off-base: His songs often talked about street shit — i.e. hustling, scamming, mooching, pimping — in an entertaining way, full of ribald double entendres.