Today is the fifth day of Black History Month. 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 talked about:
- Rick James
- OutKast‘s Big Boi
- Sister Rosetta Tharpe
- John Lee Hooker
- Patti LaBelle
- The Temptations‘ second and longest tenured lead vocalist Dennis Edwards, who was born 81 years ago yesterday.
- Tina Turner
I’ve mentioned this story several times through my various social media accounts — but it’s a worthy one of sharing multiple times: I was in the Netherlands for a business trip during the last week of Obama’s presidency and just before 45 was about to be inaugurated.
I flew into Amsterdam Schiphol, went through customs, got my borrowed suitcase and took the train into Amsterdam. I had a hotel waiting for me about an hour south in Dordrecht, but I couldn’t check into the hotel until 3:00pm, so I decided to kill a few hours in Amsterdam. Not a bad idea to start the trip, you know?
Within my first few hours in that beautiful country, I wandered around Amsterdam’s Centrum taking photos with my Canon T3i and my iPhone, and texting friends and family — letting them know that I landed and sending them photos, of course. Eventually, I stopped in a little cafe to warm up, get coffee and breakfast — and to kill as much time as I could before catching a train to Dordrecht.
I wound up at this one cafe, about 15 minutes or so before they were about to open. Being cautious, I decided to wait until they were open; however, the cafe had an extremely friendly and very Dutch waitress, who waved me inside.
The radio was on and a morning radio show was playing. They had the typical morning show banter — in Dutch. And commercials for local businesses and what not, of course. A few minutes of music here and there. At one point, this station played an Aretha Franklin song, and the waitress was singing along. I had been in the country all of about three hours. Seriously, three hours and I was encountering American pop and pop culture — someplace else.
For me, this was a visceral and powerful reminder of a few things:
- Black culture is American culture.
- Black art is American art
- And that has to mean one key thing: Black history is American history.
Are there any artists more transcendent, more important and more influential than Aretha Franklin? I sincerely doubt it. You can’t think of soul, pop, R&B or gospel without mentioning Retha at some point. Nor can you think of an artist in the last 60 years, who wouldn’t cite her work as being an influence on them.
