If she were still with us in life, Sunday would be Nobel- and Pulitzer-winning novelist Toni Morrison’s 93rd birthday. Though she joined the ancestors in 2019, the words she gifted us with will live on forever.
Through her years of writing and her total immersion in Black history and culture, there was always a deep connection to Black music and musicians. It’s no coincidence that the second novel in her
Beloved Trilogy was “
Jazz,” or that we hear a “rainbow of Blackness” in her “
Song of Solomon,” to which pianist
Jason Moran and bassist
Christian McBride played tribute during
a 2023 performance at the Kennedy Center.
Before I celebrate the illustrious Ms. Morrison, and the music that informed so much of her writing, I want to take a moment to address the readers of this series.
Thank you for supporting Black music in all its rich variety. This is the 200th installment of “Black Music Sunday,” which started as a source of healing at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, and we’re still going!
”Black Music Sunday” is a weekly series highlighting all things Black music with 200 stories 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.
Let’s open with some music in Morrison’s honor, in a 2012 performance from
India.Arie. Note how honored the singer-songwriter is to perform in front of her hero.
YouTube Video
From the
YouTube video notes:
Grammy Award-winning singer and songwriter India.Arie performs at 'Sheer Good Fortune - Celebrating Toni Morrison' on Oct. 16, 2012, in Burruss Hall on Virginia Tech's campus. She wrote this song, 'Not Afraid of the Dark,' after she finished reading "The Bluest Eye" by Morrison.
Morrison talks about her mother’s singing, and the way the Black community uses Black language—noting that “the history was in their songs”—in this 2004 interview. It’s part of a series conducted by the
National Visionary Leadership Project.
YouTube Video
Here’s a short look at Morrison’s early life,
from Biography:
Born Chloe Anthony Wofford on February 18, 1931, in Lorain, Ohio, Toni Morrison was the second oldest of four children. Her father, George Wofford, worked primarily as a welder but held several jobs at once to support the family. Her mother, Ramah, was a domestic worker. Morrison later credited her parents with instilling in her a love of reading, music and folklore along with clarity and perspective.
Living in an integrated neighborhood, Morrison did not become fully aware of racial divisions until she was in her teens. "When I was in first grade, nobody thought I was inferior. I was the only Black in the class and the only child who could read," she later told a reporter from
The New York Times. Dedicated to her studies, Morrison took Latin in school and read many great works of European literature. She graduated from Lorain High School with honors in 1949.
At Howard University, Morrison continued to pursue her interest in literature. She majored in English and chose the classics for her minor. After graduating from Howard in 1953, Morrison continued her education at Cornell University. She wrote her thesis on the works of
Virginia Woolf and
William Faulkner and completed her master's degree in 1955. She then moved to the Lone Star State to teach at Texas Southern University.
In 2015, the BBC “Imagine” series produced a one-hour episode about Morrison’s life with her involvement. Watch “
imagine: Toni Morrison Remembers” in its entirety below.
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The “Imagine” doc was followed in 2019 by a two-hour “
American Masters” production of “The Pieces I Am,” which was released just a few months before she died.
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Daphne A. Brooks, professor of African American Studies, Theater Studies, and American Studies at Yale University, wrote
this exploration of Morrison’s links to music for Pitchfork in 2019:
Toni Morrison and the Music of Black Life
Last summer, I pried open what was, for me, the equivalent of Morrison’s mother’s trunk: the trove of papers, notes, lectures, letters, unpublished writing, memorabilia, and photographs that
the author had donated to Princeton’s Rare Books and Special Collections archive in 2014. As I was finishing writing a book about black feminist blues and jazz women’s alternative sounds, cultures, and intellectual life, this was a pilgrimage I felt I had to make. I needed to know what those adolescent years had been like for her growing up in Lorain, Ohio.
What I found were meditations on the preciousness of her childhood—and so much more about the music of her life that seemed to sit at the very core of her being. “I was surrounded by all kinds of music as a girl...” she said during her Opera America Keynote in 2005. “All the adults in my family, it seemed, could play instruments when they picked them up. None of them could read music, but all of them could hear music and then repeat it.” And while it was her mother who possessed all of the talent in this realm—“My mother sang opera, she sang sentimental Victorian songs, she sang arias from
Carmen, she sang jazz, she sang blues, she sang what Ella Fitzgerald sang, and she sang ‘Ave Maria,’” she once told
Lears—Morrison would circle back to the musical roots of her family on multiple occasions. She worked with composers to produce magisterial theater works and chamber pieces. She performed in the round with her luminary counterparts in music and dance. She surfed genres. “I wrote some so-called art songs, some jazz lyrics, even a spiritual…” she once said. Her collaborations ranged broadly, from
Degga, a 1995 performance piece with bebop drummer Max Roach and experimental choreographer Bill T. Jones, to
Desdemona, a feminist reimagining of Shakespeare mounted in 2011 alongside famed theater director Peter Sellars and Malian musician Rokia Traoré.
[...]
Morrison making music is a thing to marvel over, just as Morrison moving to music is an electrifying thing to behold—which is why
the archival photos of Professor M. in motion have brought collective joy to the internet in recent years. It’s 1974 and you’re right there on the dancefloor with her. You wonder what she’s grooving to, in that spaghetti-strap top and hoop earrings and a perfect fro, mouth wide open. She is glorious and the glory looking up toward the heavens with one arm raised, as though she’s apprehending something off in the distant universe, the thing on the other side of all of our constrictions. In this moment she embodies a line from her draft notes for
Jazz: “The music was not only inside her and for her; it was
about her.” We are and will forever be all about her.
Here’s a clip of
Rokia Traoré’s performance in “Desdemona”:
YouTube Video
I searched for video performance of “Degga” but could not find one, only this photo:
Toni Morrison and Max Roach in duet, Paris 1994.
@FESTIVALAUTOMNE JAZZ. "I want my language to have a sound, have a rhythm, have a color, and have all these things without being decorative."
pic.twitter.com/xE1R3K0B2x
— Jason Moran (@morethan88)
May 4, 2021
I did find a short clip from Bill T. Jones.
YouTube Video
From the YouTube notes:
“As part of the evening and the centennial celebration of the late jazz drummer and composer Max Roach, Jones performs an intervention, revisiting and reflecting on Degga (1995), a performance that was created through a legendary collaboration between Jones, Roach, and Toni Morrison"
RELATED STORY: Drumming down the walls of racism: Remembering Max Roach
“The Bluest Eye” also inspired Chilean jazz saxophonist and composer
Melissa Aldana to write a tune of the same name. In
an interview with Ken Micallef for Stereophile, Aldana stated:
"The Bluest Eye" was named after the Toni Morrison book. In the book, a poor African-American girl who grapples with depression has this idea that to be beautiful, she must have blue eyes. That resonated with me. Coming from the lower middle class in Santiago, I went to a normal public high school and grew up feeling lower middle class. Other people had more money, and that made a strong impression on me. My classmates and I would often wear blue contact lenses. I never really thought about this until I read this book and thought, "Wow, this is very interesting."
Have a listen:
YouTube Video
Morrison also inspired contemporary hip-hop artist Akua Naru. As literature professor Rocío Cobo-Piñero wrote for Feminismo/s
“Beyond Literature: Toni Morrison’s Musical and Visual Legacy For Black Women Artists”:
The work of Akua Naru–U.S. hip-hop artist and activist of Ghanaian descent based in Germany–frequently invokes black women’s lived experiences and creative history. She accurately refers to how Morrison taught African Americans that «we are going to do this work at the margins, and you are all going to come and gather at the margins like it’s the center»(Naru, 2018). Naru also paid direct tribute to Morrison in her third studio album, The Miner’s Canary (2015), a stylish blend of hip-hop, soul, jazz and blues. The title of the album symbolically connects the traditional use of canaries in coal mines with the historical position of African Americans. Miners would take caged canaries down into the pit because they are more sensitive to toxic gases than humans. If the canary died, the miners knew there were dangerous gases present and would leave the mine, which points to how birds were sacrificed, much in the same manner the lives of black people have been disposable in the United States.
The song entitled “Toni Morrison” begins with the singer trying to decide which of Morrison’s novel is her favorite: Song of Solomon, Sula, The Bluest Eye, Beloved or A Mercy. Naru also engages with the symbology of the bird; this time the central metaphor of the album is a canary, whose beauty permeates through its entrapment
The cover, a painting by artist Tamara Natalia Madden, represents Naru holding a classic cardioid ribbon microphone as if it were a walking stick. In her left hand, she holds an African ancestral spear. On her right shoulder, beside the microphone, perches a yellow canary. She is wearing a colorful shirt, in the form of a quilt. These elements have all a direct reference to African American legacy, whose history and voice have often been silenced. The singer defiantly declares in this sense her intention to “provide a body of knowledge» through her music and “honor her mothers’ mothers’ voices” by centralizing black women’s experiences in her work, an approach she credits to the example of Toni Morrison.
Here’s the album cover Cobo-Piñero describes:
Added to Hip Hop on Spotify: "Toni Morrison" by Akua Naru
https://t.co/2MODjzilir pic.twitter.com/rCZrc7Ei1a
— cratesofjr (@cratesofjr)
April 30, 2018
Give a listen to this live version of Akua Naru’s tribute (
lyrics here):
YouTube Video
Musicologist Anna Hinkley explored
Morrison’s excursions into classical music for Classical Music Indy.
In 1992, the year before Morrison was presented with the Nobel Prize in Literature, she collaborated with composer Andre Previn on the song cycle Honey and Rue, made up of six songs accompanied by chamber orchestra. Reportedly a result of a request by soprano Kathleen Battle, who premiered it that year, the lyrics of Honey and Rue were Morrison’s first writing for an original score. “I worked with images rather than a story,” Morrison stated in the liner notes of Battle’s later recording. “I was interested in the marriage of language and music.” Two years later, her work appeared again in Andre Previn’s composition Four Songs after Poems by Toni Morrison, for Soprano, Cello and Piano, which was premiered by soprano Sylvia McNair in 1994.
Over a decade later, at the age of 74, Morrison wrote her first and only libretto for the opera Margaret Garner in collaboration with the composer Richard Danielpour. Premiered in 2005 in Detroit, Michigan, the titular role of Margaret Garner was performed by Denyse Graves. Filling in for Jessye Norman, soprano Angela Brown sang the role of the opera’s matriarch, Cilla. Brown described the opera as “a work that really showed off the American quilt. You had every genre of American music… it left no one out.” Based loosely on the real-life story of the enslaved woman Margaret Garner, which Morrison had previously used as the basis of the novel Beloved, the opera follows a woman who briefly escaped slavery with her family. Upon being recaptured, Margaret Garner kills her two children rather than returning them to a life of slavery. Margaret, who is the sole survivor of the escape attempt, is finally charged with destruction of property rather than with murder, and sentenced to death. Toni Morrison’s treatment of this wrenching story engages with what it means to be human and to love in the most oppressed circumstances.
Have a listen to “Honey and Rue.”
YouTube Video
From the YouTube video notes:
“From the concert performed at the Eastman School of Music, Brianna J. Robinson performs Andre Previn's Honey and Rue with the Eastman School Symphony Orchestra on December 6th, 2017, Garrett Wellenstein conducting”
Give a listen to
Soprano Victoria Okafor: "A Quality Love" from Margaret Garner
YouTube Video
From the YouTube video notes:
CINCINNATI OPERA AT 100, a one-hour special celebrating Cincinnati Opera's first century, features performances from iconic locations across the Queen City. Here, soprano Victoria Okafor sings the poignant "A Quality Love" from Richard Danielpour and Toni Morrison's 2005 opera MARGARET GARNER at the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center
Shifting genres, in this jazz tribute to Morrison, we hear a piece inspired by “Song of Solomon”:
Embedded Content
From the YouTube video notes (find the
transcript here):
Jason Moran and Christian McBride perform "Toni Morrison said Black is a Rainbow," a song Moran wrote as a tribute to Toni Morrison based on a section of her novel "Song of Solomon." They discuss how Morrison put a lot of effort into finding meaningful and poetic ways of holding a mirror up to all our lives. This piece involves the bass and piano and a brief spoken portion performed by Moran.
No exploration of Morrison and her deep relationship to Black music and musicians would be complete without highlighting Nina Simone. As English professor
Emily Lordi wrote in 2019
for The New Yorker:
Toni Morrison, Nina Simone: United in Soul
Literary critics sometimes compare Morrison’s writing to jazz, the genre after which she titled her novel from 1992, and whose cultural prestige as “America’s classical music” befits her canonical stature. But Morrison, who wrote with relish in “The Bluest Eye” about the “funkiness of passion” that erupts despite attempts at feminine respectability, shared as much with the gritty virtuosity of soul singers as she did with the most cerebral forms of jazz. Her work resonates with the music of those soul artists alongside whom she honed her craft: the grand ambition of Isaac Hayes, the moral clarity of Curtis Mayfield, and the erotic truth-telling of
Aretha Franklin. But the soul artist who is most closely aligned with Morrison is Nina Simone. “She saved our lives,” Morrison said of the singer, after Simone’s death, in 2003. Simone meant so much to her, and to other black women, I think, in part because of how she turned social exclusion into superlative beauty and style. It was this recuperative alchemy that defined soul, as a music and an ethos. And, if Simone was soul’s “High Priestess,” Morrison was one of its literary architects.
Simone was born two years after Morrison, in 1933. A musical prodigy by any measure, she played piano in her mother’s church while she was still a toddler and studied classical music throughout her early life. But her dreams of becoming a classical pianist began to wither when she was denied admission to the Curtis Institute of Music, in Philadelphia, owing to her race. It was a foundational trauma, but Simone made of it a radically new aesthetic: a mixture of classical, gospel, the blues, and anything else that inspired her. “I was and still am influenced by everything I hear,” she said, citing Bach, Louis Armstrong, and Marian Anderson as examples. By the nineteen-sixties, she had turned her institutional homelessness into a righteous artistic nomadism.
In Simone’s recording of the jazz standard “
Love Me or Leave Me,” she weaves a solo around a Bach-style fugue. In “Mississippi Goddam,” she couches a statement of black rage in a show tune, like a concealed explosive. But she most explicitly turns marginalization into sonic innovation in her recording of “
Ain’t Got No, I Got Life” (or simply “Life”), from the rock musical “Hair.” With her rich and pointed voice, Simone catalogues her deprivations: “Ain’t got no home, ain’t got no shoes, ain’t got no money, ain’t got no class. . . .” Nor does she have family, friends, culture, perfume, food, faith, love, or God. What she does have is, simply, herself:
I got hair, got my head, got my brain, got my heels, got my eyes, got my nose, got my mouth, I got my smile. . . .
I got my heart, got my soul, got my back, I got my sex. . . .
I think that’s a strong hint to close with Nina’s rendition:
YouTube Video
A deep thank-you to Ms. Toni Morrison for having gifted us with so much beauty and Blackness. And I want to again thank our readers who join here to read and comment each week. The well of Black music is deep, and my editor Jessica and I hope to serve up at least 200 more chapters of this history.
(Editor’s note: Yes, please!)
As always, I’ll see you in the comments for lots more music!
