TWO AMERICAS: CHARLES & SCOTT HERON

Listening to dueling visions of this country on its 250th birthday

With the USA'S 250th born day imminent I was searching through music appropriate to the moment. Two performances from the '70s by two iconic recording artists struck me as the perfectly contradictory representations of a nation built on soaring rhetoric and every day hypocrisy.

Ray Charles's version of "America the Beautiful" was recorded in 1972 for an album, A Message from the People, that was the singer/pianist’s reply to the political out put of Marvin Gaye and other younger black performers of the black power era. The ten songs include the Negro national anthem "Lift Every Voice and Sing,” the folk standard “Abraham, Martin and John” and a surprisingly potent “What Have They Done to My Song, Ma.” These songs, and the others, elude to social unrest without being explicitly protest songs. Produced by Quincy Jones, and filled with Jones's favorite sidemen of that period (bassist Carol Kaye, flutist Hubert Laws, trumpeter Freddie Hubbard, guitarist Eric Gale and Toots Thielemans), it reunited Charles with his old pal from their years in Seattle. This Quincy Jones isn't the big band man of the early '60s or the hit-maker of the '80s, but was transitioning out of Hollywood movie composer into a period of jazzy funk fusion.

Jones's dramatic sensibility had been enhanced by his years composing and arranging movies, which came in handy as he supports Charles profoundly soulful vocals. Charles had a remarkable gift for fidelity to a lyric, while injecting the words with new meanings, plus the churchy improvisations that gave any song he touched earthy spirituality. On this old chestnut of anthem Charles, as a vocalist and keyboardist, elevates the lyric from the observational to the ecstatic. In the right patriotic mood Charles and Jones soaring interpretation can make you cry. This is one of the recordings that marked Charles’s evolution from entertainer to acknowledged national treasure. Amber waves of grain, indeed.

Charles's "America the Beautiful " is a dream of this nation. Gil Scott Heron's "Winter in America" is the cold chill of reality. With haunting accompaniment from Brian Jackson and the Midnight Band, Scott Heron's low tenor speaks to the quiet terror of broken promises, dirty ghetto streets and the lies of a nation in denial. Recorded in 1975, this song is a rebuke to the greatness Charles's “America the Beautiful" suggest. The funny twist is that Scott-Heron titled his 1974 album Winter In America, but apparently didn’t write the song until later where it appears on his The First Minute of a New Day LP. In his first verse he invokes the arrival of the pilgrims and the disappearance of the buffalo. Throughout the song all symbols of optimism are lost like “the peace sign that vanished in our dreams.”

Charles was forty-one when he cut “America the Beautiful.” For a blind black man to achieve all Charles had at that time was a miracle, one he knew was a byproduct of this country’s embrace of the exceptional. He was a star in a generation of strivers who wanted their piece of the dream and praised all access. He even performed in Richard Nixon’s White House that same year. Scott Heron, in his twenties at the time he wrote the words, was a radical poet with a musical bent, a product of a generation that benefited from the civil rights movement and then asked "Whats next?" Deeply aware of the domestic repression of the Panthers and a student of global revolutionary movements, Scott- Heron spoke to the disillusionment found in the shadow of the stars and stripes. On the 250th anniversary of the the United States I admire both men, hearing their messages and understanding deeply that America is both beautiful and cold as hell.