August Green, Featuring Brandy

If, like me, you’ve wondered how the name Juneteenth (not the holiday, more about that in a moment) came about, it’s what linguists call a portmanteau, a combination of two words into one, like the way fourteen and night became fortnight or the how the combination of breakfast and lunch is now commonly known as brunch. So, June nineteenth turned into Juneteenth.

As to what the holiday is about, I turn to retired teacher and activist, Ms. Opal Lee who has spent decades working to make Juneteenth a federally recognized holiday. I thought that this date was in honor of the emancipation of slaves, but that’s not quite right. The Emancipation Proclamation was signed by President Lincoln in January of 1863. What happened on June 19th, 1865 may seem astonishing. Union troops arrived in Galveston more than two and a half years after the proclamation to announce and enforce the emancipation of slaves by “General Order No. 3.”

Historians seem ridiculously divided on whether Texas had not caught up with the the news or if they were deliberately not letting their slaves know. Considering part of the problem was the low number of union troops in Texas, and the fact that even then it wouldn’t take years for news to travel there, I’d solidly go with the latter. Texas was still in rebellion. I don’t know how we can deny that.

Part of the announcement was that the freed people were advised to stay and work as hired labor, but instead many fled to find other work and family that they had been separated from. Wouldn’t you have done the same?

The President of the United States signed Juneteenth into law as an officially recognized federal holiday in 2021, and as Ms. Opal Lee said, “now we can all finally celebrate. The whole country together.”

So, how does one pick a song for what amounts to a nation’s second Independence Day? I went over so many possibilities these last few days and settled on something new, well, newer. This marvelous collaboration is between the trio who call themselves August Greene and the vocalist who goes simply by the name Brandy. It’s somewhere between jazz, hip hop, and rhythm and blues. The original song is from 1991 by Sounds of Blackness. This 2018 version is just . . . well, you give it a listen and see what you think. It’s called “Optimistic.”

You Go to My Head, Remembering Billie Holiday

Last week the world celebrated the birthday of Lady Day, as she sometimes is called. Born in Philadelphia on April 7th, 1915, Billie Holiday became an icon of jazz and blues music. She was only 44 years old when she died of complications due to liver disease, but what a legacy she left behind. Just one song from her today, but it’s one that I love to get lost in.

Image: Gjon Mili/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images

I don’t know much about Jazz, but I know about poetry, and I think Frank O’Hara does such a marvelous job of capturing what Lady’s singing does to a person. In his poem “The Day Lady Died,” he breathlessly writes about his day and preparations for a dinner that night. He creates this breathlessness, in part, with his often characteristic lack of punctuation that makes me feel like I’m listening to someone talk who is can’t stop to take a take a breath.

And then at the end when he picks up the paper with the news of her death, it hits like a punch in the gut. Here’s “The Day Lady Died” by Frank O’Hara, followed by her song, “You Go to My Head.”

The Day Lady Died

It is 12:20 in New York a Friday
three days after Bastille day, yes
it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine
because I will get off the 4:19 in Easthampton
at 7:15 and then go straight to dinner
and I don’t know the people who will feed me

I walk up the muggy street beginning to sun
and have a hamburger and a malted and buy
an ugly NEW WORLD WRITING to see what the poets
in Ghana are doing these days
I go on to the bank
and Miss Stillwagon (first name Linda I once heard)
doesn’t even look up my balance for once in her life
and in the GOLDEN GRIFFIN I get a little Verlaine
for Patsy with drawings by Bonnard although I do
think of Hesiod, trans. Richmond Lattimore or
Brendan Behan’s new play or Le Balcon or Les Nègres
of Genet, but I don’t, I stick with Verlaine
after practically going to sleep with quandariness

and for Mike I just stroll into the PARK LANE
Liquor Store and ask for a bottle of Strega and
then I go back where I came from to 6th Avenue
and the tobacconist in the Ziegfeld Theatre and
casually ask for a carton of Gauloises and a carton
of Picayunes, and a NEW YORK POST with her face on it

and I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of
leaning on the john door in the 5 SPOT
while she whispered a song along the keyboard
to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing

Frank O’Hara, “The Day Lady Died” from Lunch Poems. Copyright © 1964 by Frank O’Hara.
From The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara (1995)

Strangers In the Night on a Thursday

Some days thinking of the song of the day is easy. I often know days beforehand. But last night when Micah asked me, I had no idea. But it hit me that we haven’t really done any “crooners,” the Dean Martins, Eddy Arnolds of the forties, fifties, and early sixties. And who better to start with than the “king of the hill,” Old Blue Eyes himself?

Micah did the research for me and discovered that on this day, April 11th, 1966, Frank Sinatra recorded his single “Strangers in the Night” for the album by the same name. And since we missed yesterday, we can do a three-for-Thursday feature today and throw in my favorite, “Something Stupid,” which Frank sings with his daughter Nancy. Micah’s favorite is “That’s Life,” so that will round out our Thursday trio of songs.

Speaking of 1966, one of the best pieces of writing about Sinatra was by Gay Talese, and it was published by Esquire that year in May, just one month after recording today’s lead song. If you sign into your google account, you should be able to get one free article before you face the paywall. It’s worth reading, and I can thank one of my fellow librarians from when I worked in Wilkes-Barre. She had us take turns as we read through the essay one night. Here’s the article. And if you can’t read it, you might listen to this young man read it out loud here. It’s called “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold.”