“Music”: you can always count on that precious handful of people who will seek it out, discover it, love it.

Farah Jasmine Griffin

Farah Jasmine Griffin is the author of “Who Set You Flowin’?”: The African-American Migration Narrative, as well as such jazz-related volumes as If You Can’t Be Free, Be A Mystery: In Search Of Billie Holiday. With Salim Washington, she co-authored Clawing At The Limits Of Cool: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, And The Greatest Jazz Collaboration Ever. She is a professor of English and comparative literature and African-American studies at Columbia University, where she has also served as the director of the Institute for Research in African-American Studies and is a member of Professor Robert O’Meally’s Jazz Study Group at Columbia.

To a large degree, Farah dates her gateway to writing about jazz to her unusual volume on Billie Holiday (2001), though she’s been a jazz enthusiast since her childhood explorations of her dad’s record collection. This passage from her treatment of Billie – which has many biographical elements but is more a beautifully drawn literary treatment – is illustrative: “Billie Holiday has been the conduit through which many singers have discovered their own unique sound. She has certainly played a similar role for me, for to write about her is a constant state of discovery. She accompanied me through my early efforts as an aspiring writer, through my academic training, and now she has become the subject that allows me to enter the world of writing about the music I love. She has done so for others as well.”

The first thing I ever wrote about music wasn’t for publication; it was a paper that I wrote for class as an undergraduate in a literature class at Harvard. I had a literature professor who was German who specialised in African-American literature. His was the first class I ever took in African-American literature; I had been reading it since I was in junior high school but I’d never taken a class, it had never been taught to me. He used this anthology and the anthology started with the spirituals. So I wrote a paper for that class about the spirituals, more about the poetry of the spirituals than about the music.

Then later on, in graduate school, I wrote a paper for Cornel West on the blues. There was an article that had just come out by Hazel Carby, a woman who later became one of my teachers. She had written on blues women and how the classic blues women talked about issues that the women who wrote about intellectuals wouldn’t touch. They sang about sexuality, sang about poverty, and all of this; I wrote an essay on the impressions we could learn about Black people’s lives through these blues women and what they were singing.

Growing up I listened to a lot of R&B, and post-bebop jazz, but I had never really listened to the blues in that way; that was the first time that I really took my time. At the time, I didn’t think I’d be writing about music, but those classes gave me a chance to write about spirituals and the blues.

I was reading everything. It was after I had written my dissertation, and after that became my first book. I was trying to write about the ways Black artists talked about the way our people migrated from the South to the North. I wanted to see how they talked about it and everything: like, did they paint about it, did they write short stories about it, did they write scholarly works – and what kind of music, how did the music reflect on that experience? For me the music was one part of our larger culture and history; it wasn’t devoid of these other things. I felt like, if I’m going to write about Black cultural history, I have to take the music seriously. The goal was to write a form of history about Black people, and the music was one source.

I never thought, “Oh, I’m going to write about the music separate from all of this other stuff.” The music was a gateway, a basic part of this Black life. My first real publication – which was a kind of cultural history about African-Americans – included a lot about music. Someone who read the book, and who I respected a lot, said to me, “As I was reading it, I wanted to hear more of what you have to say about music.”

My dissertation turned into my first book, “Who Set You Flowin’?”: The African-American Migration Narrative; it was about the ways that African-American artists talked about migration. There are tons of blues lyrics about migration, and then there’s Stevie Wonder’s “Livin’ For The City”, but I also wrote about Richard Wright, James Baldwin – I read hundreds of books and listened to a ton of music around that, and that was the first piece I wrote on music.

The music that I wrote about in “Who Set You Flowin’?” was everything from the blues to some stuff on Stevie Wonder and finally on hiphop. I had been thinking about music, thinking maybe I wanted to write more about music; thinking about this project I might want to do on Billie Holiday that was like a dream project. But I still hadn’t yet decided. I didn’t really have the chops to write about music; I thought I had to learn more.

I was trying to think of what my next project would be, and during the time I was writing that dissertation I felt like I missed a whole stage of Black popular music because I stopped listening to it. When I was writing the dissertation and the book, I just started listening more and more to jazz; I listened to a lot of John Coltrane. It was hard for me to come out of that mindset and listen to contemporary popular music because to me it all sounded very repetitive – I was really bored by it. So I feel like I missed a certain section of R&B.

After that – this was the early 1990s – I was thinking about what I would write next. So I reread Amiri Baraka, Ralph Ellison, Albert Murray, AB Spellman, and those kinds of people. They were so seductive because they wrote so beautifully. I was just starting out as a young professor, and there was a project that I thought was a good career move, a kind of literary, theoretical book, but I knew I was going to be bored to death by it. So I decided that, with all of these notes I had been taking, and kind of obsessing about Billie Holiday, I would write about her. But I also knew that in order to write about her I needed to learn a bit more about the music I had been listening to. I needed to learn more about it and take it more seriously.

So I listened and read a lot; I even took some music lessons. I used to play the flute, but I didn’t know music theory. My first introduction to music was through my father: he was a big fan, so I inherited all of his records. At this point I had friends that were musicians, and I would just follow them, listen to them, ask them questions, and they were so generous. They not only taught me, they encouraged me just to trust my ear.

I’d say, “What is this, what are you doing?” And they’d say, “Just follow your ear...” They knew that I had an interest in writing about music, but mostly they knew that I loved the music – that’s how I ended up meeting most of them. I also wanted to know what I should be listening to. I remember saying to one of them, “I don’t know anything about music theory,” and they’d say, “A lot of people who know stuff about music theory can’t write about this music; they’re too busy caught up in the music theory.”

They were encouraging me because there weren’t that many Black people writing about music, because so much of the writing about music was not really understanding the context out of which the music was emerging. Some of them were people who were also doing some writing about music themselves, but most were not. They really wanted more Black people to be writing about the music.

So that was my experience. I had a friend, Salim Washington, a musician who was also in school and was involved with Robert O’Meally and the Jazz Study Group at Columbia; this was after I’d started trying to write about the music. He said, “There’s this group of people who you need to meet, they’re all doing really similar, interesting things,” and so he brought me into the group. I had by then already started writing on my own.

I taught myself and was taught by people from asking questions. I did take a jazz class in Philly from a brother, who has since died, who used to be on the radio in Philly at the Temple University station wrti. Harrison Ridley taught that class at a community college at night, and that’s the only jazz class I ever took, once a week for five weeks. My classroom was the other writers I was reading and the musicians.

I knew I wanted to write about Billie Holiday; I’d been listening to her for what seemed like my whole life, and she really felt like my own. I read everything I could find that had been written about her, but then I became very discouraged because I felt like it had already been done. And then I decided that I was not going to write her biography, because there were Billie biographies out there, and some of them were good, but I was really interested in what I thought I heard in her music versus what I felt were the myths about her. I felt like most people – not jazz fans, but most people in general – knew more about the myths than they knew about the music, so I wanted to juxtapose. How do you know what you think you know about Billie Holiday, and what kind of work does that icon do versus the story that we hear?

That seemed like it was a more complex tale: there is somebody who left a body of work for us to listen to; I wanted to share what I learned about listening to this body of work; and then also what I learned by looking at the way she’s represented, separate from the music she produced. Somewhere in between we might get closer to who she was. So I looked at her, I looked at the movies about her, I looked at the way she was used in advertising, I looked at the way intellectuals wrote about her, the way poets wrote about her. And in every one of those chapters I also tried to listen to some part of that vast body of work that she left us. That body of work told us a lot about her as a woman, told me a lot about African-American life, told me a lot about the struggles that we all have, just trying to live.

So that was the angle I took, and it also opened me up to listening not just to Billie; she became like a gateway. I wanted to listen to the people who came before her and listen to the people who came after her. It was through her that I started seriously listening to tenor saxophonists, to the musicians that she said influenced her and to the musicians who say they were influenced by her. It just opened up a whole world. What was so exciting about it was that there was no closure: I was never going to know everything, there was always something to learn, and I felt like my brain was just exploding because I was constantly discovering what had come before but also listening to what people were doing now, and it felt like a journey that had no end.

I did the research and wrote it in about five years. But when I look back on it, I had been thinking about it for so long. I looked back on when I wrote the prospectus for my dissertation, and the first draft of the proposal had a chapter on Billie Holiday – and I had completely forgotten that. And then I remembered when I started looking at the stuff I had been collecting about her for years, even before I went to college, and I certainly had been listening to her all along.

Like I said, my father was my introduction to many things, my introduction to history and music and politics and all things that he loved, and then he died when I was nine years old. Billie was the only woman he used to talk about. He’d talk about Miles and Trane and Monk and Bird – he’d talk about all of these people, and she was the only woman. I think that stood out, and there was probably some record of hers among those records. I remember those records very clearly, and after he died I used to just play those records over and over again.

She was part of his pantheon, and then right about the time he died Lady Sings The Blues came out, with Diana Ross, there were all these articles about Diana Ross but also about Billie Holiday – so I remember reading all of those. I think it was just something visceral. And her voice – even as a girl I was captivated by her voice, and I didn’t understand why. I remember thinking, “She’s not Aretha, she’s not even Roberta Flack, but why am I so enamoured by this voice?” And I realised that I was listening to late-period Billie Holiday. A lot of the reissues that came out around the time of that movie were late Billie Holiday.

I remember an aunt had Lady In Satin – I remember that album cover – but there was something so compelling about her voice, so I just started listening and listening and I just think her voice expressed to me a sense of loss, even then, when I couldn’t articulate it. It was much later on that I heard a younger Billie, and I said, “Oh, that’s a dif­ferent Billie Holiday, that sounds flirtatious.” And then I got it: Here, she actually sounds like a horn. While I thought Sarah Vaughan’s voice was just so pretty, so beautiful, and Ella’s voice made me so happy, I just kept coming back to Billie Holiday – and hers was the voice.

© Duke University Press, 2023

Ain't But A Few Of Us: Black Music Writers Tell Their Story edited by Willard Jenkins is published by Duke University Press.

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