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November 25, 2019
Mary Ann Cain's Playlist for Her Book "South Side Venus: The Legacy of Margaret Burroughs"
In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Heidi Julavits, Hari Kunzru, and many others.
Mary Ann Cain's South Side Venus is a rich and profound biography of Chicago curator, artist, and activist Margaret Burroughs.
Publishers Weekly wrote of the book:
"Cain (Down from Moonshine) delivers on the promise of this profound biography’s subtitle by lauding the intentionally crafted legacy of Margaret Burroughs (1915–2010), a Chicago artist, activist, and community organizer."
In her own words, here is Mary Ann Cain's Book Notes music playlist for her book South Side Venus: The Legacy of Margaret Burroughs:
No doubt Dr. Margaret Taylor Goss Burroughs’s life had a richer soundtrack than I can even imagine. She was a stand-up, can’t-be-bought person who wasn’t much for chit chat but who was big on getting people connected to create social change through art, history, and identity building. This did not mean she wasn’t up for fun; on the contrary. From early on, she and fellow artists with the Arts Craft Guild held regular Saturday “rent” parties to congregate, exhibit their art, and pool funds to cover the next month’s rent. As an elder, she expected to be called “Dr. Burroughs” and would have given serious side-eye to anyone who didn’t; I certainly did. But I think of and talk about her as Margaret. I was just one person of thousands who approached her for her cultural knowledge, in my case about the Bronzeville neighborhood of Chicago where she spent most of her life. She was one of those rare people who walked the walk. In her later years, she agreed to take me around historical landmarks of her beloved home one hot August afternoon. Several years later after she died, that walk made me realize just how important it was for her story to be told. I didn’t think anyone else would or could do it; she hung out with artists, not so much writers, after all. So I decided I would, to honor her legacy and make it part of mine.
These songs are what I imagine as part of the soundtrack of her life.
1. “Muskrat Ramble,” by Louis Armstrong and his Hot Five. Recorded in Chicago, 1926
Margaret arrived with the first wave of the Great Migration from St. Rose, Louisiana, to Chicago in 1922. Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong had followed that wave the same year with his mentor, King Oliver, up from New Orleans. (Did I mention Louis was born the same year as my South Sider grandfather?) A lot of people don’t associate Louis with Chicago, but he cut his teeth in South Side clubs, and, with wife Lil Armstrong, eventually bought one of them, the Sunset Café, later named the Grand Terrace. Until recently, the building housed Meyers Ace Hardware, one of the stops on my walk around Bronzeville with Margaret. The owners’ grandfather had bought the building from Louis and lovingly preserved the stage and murals of the old club where Louis and Earl “Fatha” Hines had made a name for themselves, and where Al Capone at one point had a 25 percent stake. DuSable High School graduate Nat King Cole also got a start there. Louis’ song, “Muskrat Ramble,” has that quintessential ragtime feel that echoes New Orleans Dixieland but pumps the blood of Chicago, that big-shouldered, fast-paced city that embraced Louis and Margaret, even as it ground its heels into their scrambling young lives.
Margaret’s linocut of Louis hangs in the South Side Community Art Center just down the street. SSCAC is one of the two arts institutions she helped found.
2. “Joe Hill,” sung by Paul Robeson to Scottish miners, 1949
McCarthyism and the Red Scare of the late 1940s and 1950s virtually wiped out the career of Paul Robeson, virtuoso singer, actor, athlete, and social justice activist, best known for his Hollywood movie career, which includes his unforgettable rendition of “Old Man River.” Exiled to Great Britain for eight years, by the time he returned to the U.S., he was sick, broke, and for the most part, shunned, including by his own people. But Margaret was determined to keep his legacy alive and well. She met him when she was a teenager, taken to a concert by an uncle who then brought her to a reception. She vowed to be his “gal Friday” for the rest of her life, and indeed, she helped him at every turn, even as many others turned their backs on him. When she was faced with hard questions or problems, she would ask herself, “What would Paul Robeson do?” When she was red-baited in 1952 before the Chicago Board of Education, pressured to rat out fellow DuSable High school teachers, she risked her job and refused to cave. She followed Paul Robeson’s example as someone who clung to their principles.
“Joe Hill” is a classic union anthem. “Big Paul,” as Margaret affectionately called him in her ode to him, applies his operatic baritone to this humble song that he sang to Scottish miners in the 1940s. They listened, mesmerized and weeping. Robeson sang in over a dozen languages and learned folk tunes from most every country. He never forgot his roots with what Margaret called “the little people,” of which she counted herself one. He also stood for racial equality and harmony, which Margaret also advocated for to the end of her life.
3. “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” Black (previously Negro) National Anthem. James Weldon Johnson, 1900
Even as a young child, Margaret was attuned to the inequality and oppression suffered by her family, friends, neighbors, and community. Lucky for her, Bronzeville in the early 20th century was a hotbed of radicalism and resistance. She surely would have encountered “Lift Every Voice and Sing” early on, perhaps at one of the Washington Park forums where soapbox speeches and spontaneous performances were the norm, and where young people mingled with the best minds of the time. Or perhaps the NAACP chapter she joined as a high schooler brought this song to her attention. Margaret came of age as African Americans began to turn negative stereotypes of blackness on their heads and forge a “New Negro” identity. This anthem is the embodiment of racial pride, a pride that Margaret carried through to generations to come.
4. “Tonky Boogie,” performed by pianist Forrest Sykes, 1940s
Margaret’s beloved neighborhood, Bronzeville, was the place for jazz for decades. “The Stroll” for nightlife was around State Street and 47th, where anybody who was anybody knew to put on their best threads and mix and mingle with out-of-towners, white people, and all people high- and low-brow. Margaret hired on to write for Claude Barnett’s Associated Negro Press to supplement her income after she married artist Bernard Goss (It was determined she was going to have to be the practical one or they (literally) would be “starving artists.”) Luckily, the extra work sometimes included some extra fun. Margaret published a review of one of Sykes’s early performances at the Hamilton Hotel in downtown Chicago. He was “beating out some superior hot boogie on the 88 keys” with a “powerful, tantalizing style all his own.” Margaret, being Margaret, could not help but editorialize a bit about the venue: “Music is democratic and this was shown by the aggregation of Negro and white artists, all experts in their own right, who were able to get together in a series of collective improvisations and create some genuine jazz.”
“Tonky Boogie” is too hot to touch! Some credit Sykes as a forerunner to boogie-woogie master Jerry Lee Lewis. (Personally, I think Lewis has got nothing on Sykes.) Enjoy!
5. Paul Robeson sings a Mexican lullaby.
It’s a well-worn title, but “Man of the People” captures the essential Paul Robeson. In our current age of cynicism, corruption, and despair, it may be hard to imagine how anyone could embody such largeness of spirit and unshakable principle. But Paul Robeson did. When African Americans joined the Abraham Lincoln Brigade to fight the Fascists in Spain, Robeson went to sing to them. He raised a son in the Soviet Union, learned the folk songs of the minority ethnics in their language, and toured the U.S.S.R. to sing just to them. They named a mountain for him there. Of course, he was a human being with many foibles, as his biographer Martin Duberman has chronicled. But, as Margaret proclaimed in her poem to him, “He was our Big Paul.”
Margaret traveled to Mexico twice in the early 1950s, the first time to write a travelogue for the Associated Negro Press and the second as a sabbatical leave to get away from red-baiting that put her teaching job in jeopardy. She studied printmaking at the Taller de Grafica in Mexico City and fell in love with the people, art, and culture of that country. Her best-known art is done with the linocut technique she learned there.
This lullaby captures the soft-hearted feeling she held for a country that gave her abrazos without reservation.
6. Nat King Cole, “Unforgettable.”
DuSable High School produced many marvelous musicians, writers, and artists from its inception in the early 20th century. Nat King Cole attended DuSable at the same time Margaret studied art at Englewood High School; Nat was two years her junior. They moved in parallel social groups in Bronzeville, both shaped by the powerfully community-boosting culture of the neighborhood. Even in the depths of the Great Depression and then later World War Two, Nat and Margaret rose and thrived as artists because the elders around them took them seriously.
“Unforgettable” is certainly one of Nat King Cole’s signature songs, one that was also recorded as a duet with his talented daughter, Natalie, long after his passing. Its smooth tones and honeyed melody embody him and Margaret, and their respective legacies, as most definitely “unforgettable.”
7. Mahalia Jackson, “How I Got Over.” Sung at the March on Washington, August 1963
It’s unlikely renowned gospel singer Mahalia Jackson and Margaret Burroughs crossed paths, though they likely knew of each other from the Bronzeville neighborhood; it was that kind of place, where two- or three-degrees of separation was the rule. Where religion and social justice overlapped is where their mutual appreciation and respect may have taken root.
Margaret’s relationship to religion was unconventional for the times, to say the least. Margaret was raised Catholic by her St. Rose, Louisiana, parents and attended Catholic elementary school. But when she was refused entry into a Catholic high school because of her race, her formal religious affiliation ended. However, as an artist, she drew upon some religious iconography to amplify the spiritual and soulful expressions of her subjects. While she bluntly criticized predatory pastors who took their congregation’s dollars and lived high on the hog, she embraced figures such as Reverend Helen “Queen Mother” Sinclair, with whom she ministered to prisoners in Stateville and Joliet prison. Helen drew upon the Gospels, Margaret art and poetry. Margaret’s daughter, Gayle, was a deeply spiritual person who wrote poetry and gave inspiring talks. While Margaret was a dedicated socialist, she embraced religious people like Queen Mother who worked for social uplift.
“Precious Lord, Take My Hand,” written by Thomas Dorsey, musical director at Pilgrim Baptist Church in Bronzeville, was a signature song for Mahalia Jackson. She sang it at Dr. Martin Luther King’s funeral. There were few people in the Movement who didn’t hear that wrenching performance; surely Margaret did, too.
Margaret was born the same year as the Russian Revolution, 1917. The Soviet Union shadowed her entire life, at first through Paul Robeson’s passionate embrace of its progressive legislation regarding ethnic minorities, including those of African descent, and those groups’ embrace of him (he later realized his ignorance of Stalin’s silent massacres). Later influence came through her second husband, Charles Burroughs. Charlie’s mother was a school teacher and a member of the Communist Party in New York City. She sent her sons abroad to escape the racism of the United States. Charlie grew up in Stalinist Soviet Union while maintaining his U.S. Citizenship. While his mother begged him to attend college, he opted instead for work in a Soviet auto factory (he claimed he never had a problem finding work there because of his race) and later, in the Russian circus. World War Two claimed him for the U.S. draft, and after the war, he returned to his birth country. He and Margaret met as camp counselors for a communist children’s summer camp in New Jersey and married shortly thereafter after she proposed.
During their many years together, Margaret and Charlie hosted kitchen table salons at their home on 3806 S. Michigan Avenue, which would also become the Ebony Museum, later the DuSable Museum of African American History in Washington Park. In the 1960s, they organized a cultural exchange between U.S. and Soviet artists, traveling to the U.S.S.R. at a time when many feared the political consequences. Among the many humble and luminous visitors to the kitchen table salon were Charlie’s beloved Russian Circus friends and fellow performers. This music captures the flavor of that country’s playful and soulful performative attitude.
9. Afro-Cuban All Stars, “Amor Verdadero,” 1998
“Go see for yourself!” was a favorite catchphrase of Margaret’s. Having early on been gaslighted about African Americans and their supposed lack of history or significance, Margaret learned to seek out independent sources of information and knowledge. When it came to learning about Cuba and its large African diaspora population, she found a way to “see for herself” via the educational visas that were available even after travel bans were in place in the 1960s. After their excursions to Mexico, Margaret and Charlie became dedicated world travelers. When they began the Ebony Museum of African American History in their living room on South Michigan Avenue, they also became prominent collectors of African-rooted art.
Margaret traveled to Cuba on more than one occasion. No doubt she reveled in music such as that of the Afro-Cuban All Stars. Their song, “Amor Verdadero,” captures polyrhythmic African percussion while blending in Latin melodies, harmonies, and textures—music that, like Margaret, crossed borders and found new syntheses of soul and identity.
10. “Balakulania,” West African Malinke tribal song welcoming the birth of children.
Margaret’s travel bug began with her trips to Mexico but continued throughout her life. Her ambition was to visit every country on earth—or at least where African-descended people resided (which is basically every country). Africa was of special interest to her, for obvious reasons. “Balakulania” is traditionally sung to promote fertility and welcome the birth of children. A version of it was performed when Margaret visited Fort Wayne, Indiana, and was welcomed by the Three Rivers Jenbe Ensemble, a cultural education and performance group specializing in West African music and dance for children. Margaret loved children, and they loved her back. She dedicated her life to teaching children art and poetry, and also raised two children, Paul and Gayle. Her eldest grandson, Eric, was taken on some international trips by his beloved grandmother. She made it a priority to connect with the younger generations as part of passing on her profound legacy.
Mary Ann Cain and South Side Venus: The Legacy of Margaret Burroughs links:
NewcityLit recview
Publishers Weekly review
Rolling Out interview with the author
WANE interview with the author
also at Largehearted Boy:
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