If Your White Your Right, If Your Black Get Back-With Big Bill Broonzy’s White, Black And Brown In Mind.

 

 

By Lester Lannon

Selena James had been clueless about life, about how the other half lived, about the horrors of black racial oppression that she had carefully avoided thinking about all though high school before she graduated and then began to attend Boston University (Class of 1964). She had managed to go through Riverdale High about fifty miles away from Boston without thinking of much except who would she have dates with on Saturday nights, whether she would be the head cheerleader for the championship Red Raiders football team come senior year and whether Captain Bill Clemens of that team would sweep her off her feet like he did to opposing defenses, and who would be taking her to the senior prom when that time came. And of course how far to let those dates and that Bill go with her in the back seat of some fogged up car (pretty far although that fact is not germane to the subject here so we will let that pass). Not an atypically high school student for the time although the news of the black civil right struggle and the unfathomable straitjacket of Mister James Crow were being shouted out in every newspaper, and on every radio and television.

Selena, a good student if not a great one, had applied to Boston University, NYU and Georgetown down in Washington (the latter mainly because her best friend Gloria Davis had applied and would wind up going there) in order to get freed from a dreary home life which with curfews, rule this and that, was driving her crazy although not enough to either forgo college which would have been a mistake or to go to State U and work her way through like her  second best friend Alfreda Barnes who faced the same dismal home life. So off to BU in the fall of 1960 Selena went with not much notion of the swirl that was just starting to send thunderbolts through the 1960s campuses.

Naturally Selena lived the chaperoned freshman dorms (or else her parents would have balked at sending her there-such were the concerns of parents in those times-now too from what I hear). What was not natural or fore-ordained was that her roommate would be Josie Dallas from Manhattan. Josie who was miles ahead of Selena socially but also something of a wild card in her concerns about what was going on in the world beyond whose sheets she would wind up under on any given Saturday night party night. Josie worried, along with Selena, about those sheets but from the beginning, from when they had met at Freshman Orientation and found out that they were slated to be roommates (even roommate selection was done by the administration then for freshmen looking to get a mix and unless there was some major differences not reconcilable then the roommates were glued to each other for the duration, for the year). But Josie had also been in high school, been at prestigious Hunter College High, a leader of the student support group providing materials and raising money for the student civil rights workers who were staging sit-ins and other actions down in forlorn Alabama and hellish Mississippi.        

Moreover through a high school boyfriend, Sam Lawrence, met under the arch at Washington Square one summer Sunday afternoon between junior and senior years she had imbibed the folk scene in the Village which was extending out to the colleges in the area. Sam, a sophomore at NYU, and a budding folksinger, had also been an ardent supporter of the black civil rights workers and had settled on a playlist that included covering many protest songs from the young musicians who were gathering in the Village to perfect their craft, work out the kinks, Sam called it. Once Sam and Josie got together Sam would, at first, drag Josie to all the big venues in the city, Geddes Folk City, Village Vanguard, The Jagged Rock, Mike’s across from the Village Vanguard (that’s the way everybody described the place once folk because big enough that not everybody could get into the big clubs and so places like Mike’s drew the overflow). That is when she first heard Blake Sams doing covers of an old black artist, Big Bill Broonzy. One that stuck out was White, Brown and Black with the puzzling line “if you are white you are right, if you are brown stick around, if you are black get back” in the lyrics. Sam explained to Josie that that whole color scheme, right or wrong, described far better than all the sociology books and political treatises the nature of the racial structure in America. The more she thought about that sequence the more she became committed to the civil rights struggle down south.

Once Josie realized after meeting Selena that she was clueless about the big race question tearing through America and about folk music too (she swore that the music that Selena had brought with her to listen to while studying would “rot her brain” and eventually Selena would go from listening to that music, called “bubble gum music” by Josie, when she was not around to shipping the records back home after freshman year) she decided to “tutor” her. That tutoring included a night at the Club Blue coffeehouse in Harvard Square when Blake Sams would be coming up from New York City to play his covers of Big Bill Broonzy (and others like Lead Belly, Woody Guthrie and Josh White). That night Selena heard White, Brown and Black for the first time. While Selena did not understand all the intricacies of race relations she, like Josie before her, sensed that there was a deeper meaning in that song than all the stuff she was learning in the Modern Civics class that was required for freshmen.  

Oh yeah, it did not hurt that Blake Sams, the first Negro (the common proper term of usage at the time) she had known personally had asked her out on a date while he was in town. And from the way he asked her and his whole gentlemanly demeanor Selena did not think they would be only talking about race relations. Not at all. She would be able to hold her own now …..