Color Us Connected: The music of our youth

This column appears every other week in Foster’s Daily Democrat and the Tuskegee News. This week, in recognition of the season, Guy Trammell, an African American man from Tuskegee, Ala., and Amy Miller, a white woman from South Berwick, Maine, write about the music of their youth.

By Guy Trammell Jr.

Who produced more No. 1 songs than the Beach Boys, Rolling Stones, the Beatles and Elvis combined? Keep reading for the answer.

I followed these groups in childhood via Ed Sullivan and other television programs, but my introduction to music was in Sunday School and hearing Tuskegee Institute’s Golden Voices choir. I was greeted regularly by the choir director, Dr. William L. Dawson, at the Institute post office. A renowned composer, he was best know for transcribing the spirituals, or Negro songs, from the plantations. He also conducted summer symphonies in Europe while his wife purchased the latest Paris fashions for her store, the Petite Bazaar, in our Village of Greenwood.

I enjoyed the weekly country western music performances on the Tennessee Ernie Ford television program. It wasn’t until much later that I learned this music genre was originally popularized by Hank Williams, who played his guitar and sang for dances at the former Franklin School, turned community center, just outside our Village of Greenwood.

I was taught drums in Tuskegee’s Carnegie Hall, where Dr. George W. Carver, the renowned scientist, performed piano concerts. He once went on a cross-country concert tour to raise funds for the college. My mother, who at 14 taught piano lessons in Detroit, had a baby grand piano in our living room that I explored at times. She was inspired by her namesake, my great aunt Florence Cole Talbert, voice instructor at Tuskegee Institute and the first African American female on a vinyl record. My aunt performed the lead role of "Aida" in Italy, and composed the Delta Sigma Theta sorority hymn, with Alice Dunbar Nelson.

I was introduced to jazz by frequent Ramsey Lewis Trio concerts on campus. I also was captured by the amazing clarinet play of the Benny Goodman Trio on television. I later learned Goodman’s incredible piano master was Teddy Wilson, from Tuskegee.

Growing up, I depended on AM radio to hear the latest music, then visited Holland’s Appliances, our Best Buy at the time, to buy 45 rpm vinyl records. However, local radio didn’t play rhythm and blues (R&B), previously known as "race music." Some white artists, like Pat Boone, would steal songs of Black artists like Fats Domino and Little Richard, and record them as their own. So I tuned in late night to Nashville’s WLAC AM 1510, the first station to play Black artists.

WLAC had special FCC approval for a 50,000-watt clear signal reaching Canada and the Caribbean. Four white disc jockeys, who sounded Black, played nightly R&B. Early WLAC listeners included Gregg Allman, the future Bob Dylan, and a future member of Jimi Hendrix’ first band, King Kasuals. WLAC produced a recording company, Excello Records, music that influenced a young Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, as well as producing the first all Black television program, “Night Train.”

Meanwhile, Berry Gordy Jr. created Motown Records with Black artists -- The Supremes, The Temptations, Smokey Robinson, Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder and more. To avoid being labeled "race music," early record covers had no artist pictures. The Funk Brothers, seasoned jazz musicians, produced and were the band for Motown’s 90 No. 1 hits, from "Stop in the Name of Love" and "My Girl" to "Heatwave" and "What’s Going On?". The Funk Brothers did what no other group has ever done, and their music took me to high school: “We’ve got to find a way, to bring some . . .”

By Amy Miller

"Hanky Panky” by Tommy and the Shondells was the first 45 I owned. (The B side was “Thunderbolt.”) My parents introduced me to “Tom Dooley” and other Kingston Trio songs. They even took me in 1964 to Peter Paul and Mary at Carnegie Hall, but “Hanky Panky" was mine and nothing my parents would like, I was sure.

It was the mid- to late-1960s and I also had the 45 of “Paperback Writer” by the Beatles. (B side was “Rain,” a pretty good B side.) I was starting to get my own taste in music, but still the songs didn’t talk to me as far as culture or identity.

In an effort to raise my cultural literacy, my mom and her best friend, Aunt Barbara, took me and Aunt Barb’s daughter to see Leonard Bernstein Young People’s Concerts monthly at the New York Philharmonic. I was restless and bored, and utterly irritated Aunt Barbara, an accomplished pianist, as I giggled with my friend and drew mustaches on pictures in the Playbill.

By the '70s, it I had found my own music. Jackson Browne, Dave Mason, the Allman Brothers, or Springsteen, Dylan, the Dead. But it was the female musicians who created my idea of being a young adult. Decades later, I am reading a book about Carole King, Joni Mitchell and Carly Simon. The songs and sensibilities of these and other female vocalists ushered me into adulthood. They are all older than I am, but they were brand-new young adults saying how the world should and could be just when I was beginning to muse about such things myself.

My father ran a small printing company and printed record covers. That sounds pretty cool, except that all his clients were from the Caribbean and Latin America and that was way before World Music was a thing. I did not think it was cool at all.

Not counting Peter Paul and Mary, and a birthday party where eight junior high girls saw The Turtles on The Ed Sullivan Show, my first real concert was Sly and the Family Stone at Madison Square Garden. I was a sophomore in high school and it felt extremely adventurous.

Now, decades later, I am a parent and over the years have been hearing Adele and Hozier, Drake and Kendrik Lamar from my kids' iPods and iPhones. I have been introduced to Lake Street Dive and Idina Menzel. The car is often filled with the sounds of hip hop artists whose names I’ve never heard.

I nearly fell off my chair the other day when my son, who is in college, told me his favorite song is “Hey Jude." Like, "Hey Jude" by the Beatles? Yes, that one.

Well, that was my favorite song when I was 12 and going to my first boy-girl party. It was the song that meant seven terrifying minutes and 11 seconds of slow - as in arms around a guy’s neck, head on his shoulders slow - dancing. I didn’t ask if that's what it means to my son.

Amy and Guy can be contacted at colorusconnected@gmail.com.

This article originally appeared on Fosters Daily Democrat: Color Us Connected: The music of our youth