You’re Nobody ‘Til Somebody [Sings] You: Tributing Blackness

You’re Nobody ‘Til Somebody [Sings] You:
Tributing Blackness

By Mark
Anthony Neal | @NewBlackMan | with thanks to NewBlackMan (in Exile)

Monday, October 23, 2017.

“Boy, you sound like Nat King Cole” —
these words from Gregory Porter’s mother are how the Grammy Award winning
singer remembers being introduced to Nat King Cole as a child.  As Porter reflects, “I
remember thinking how strange that name was…seeing his image: this elegant,
handsome, strong man sitting by a fire.”  Porter’s introduction to Cole
comes full circle with the release of Nat King Cole & Me, a
collection 15 songs associated with the legendary vocalist and musician, who
died of lung cancer in 1965.

Porter is,
of course, not the first artist to record a collection of Nat King Cole
standards; Cole’s late daughter Natalie Cole had her biggest commercial success
in 1991 with the Grammy Award winning  Unforgettable… with Love,
anchored by the then groundbreaking digital duet between father and daughter on
the title track — which Porter wisely stays clear of. A second duet with her
father, “When I Fall in Love,” earned Cole a Grammy in 1996, and she won her
last Grammy for a deep dig into the American Songbook, that was inspired by her
father’s music.

Cole’s
tributes to her father are, of course, deeply personal, as is Porter’s tribute,
which he suggest was inspired by this idea of hearing Cole as a father
figure: “I put the vinyl on the player and out of those speakers came that
voice, that nurturing sound. It filled a void in me. My father wasn’t in
my life.”  Yet Porter’s performance of Cole, comes at a time — more than
50 years after his death — when Cole’s repertoire represents an untapped
resource for a generation of young Jazz audiences, drawn to Porter, who are
largely unfamiliar with Cole, save “Unforgettable” and “The Christmas Song”,
which Porter does cover.   

No one is
questioning the sincerity or legitimacy of Porter’s connection to Cole’s music
— you can hear the influence in Porter’s voice. The fact that such a recording
might have also been prompted by the commercial desires of  Porter’s label
Blue Note Records to mine Cole’s catalogue cannot be dismissed though — both
Blue Note and Cole’s longtime label Capitol Records are owned by the Universal
Music Group. Nat King Cole & Me is Porter’s third album for the
“major” label after recording two stellar albums on the independent Motéma Music label.

The tensions
at play in the commercial impetus for tribute albums, were certainly there, in
an earlier tribute recording to Cole.  Less than 10 months after Cole’s
death in February of 1965, Motown released Marvin Gaye’s A Tribute to the
Great Nat “King” Cole.  The Cole tribute was released
between Gaye’s How Sweet It Is to Be Loved by You (1965) and Moods of
Marvin Gaye (1966) — albums that produced four top-15 pop singles, and
Gaye’s first number one R&B singles (“I’ll be Doggone” and “Ain’t That
Peculiar”). A Tribute to the Great Nat “King” Cole, in
contrast, produced no singles, and was generally overlooked in the context of
Gaye’s ascent as a pop star.  

Yet Motown’s
desire to market Gaye as the heir Cole’s legacy — even before Cole’s death,
Gaye had recorded several Cole-like pop standard albums such as The Soulful
Moods of Marvin Gaye, When I’m Alone I Cry, and Hello Broadway —
was also major reason for the relative fast tracking of the recording. In the
1960s, Gaye was long rumored to portray Cole in a biopic of his life.

The genius
of Berry Gordy and Motown Records, was Gordy’s ability be self-reflexive about
commercial opportunity yet remain attentive enough to the everyday within Black
culture to know when to give pause to those ambitions, given the tenor of the
era. Certainly this was the case with Motown’s Black Forum label,
which issued spoken-word poetry performances and political speeches or one of
the label’s more obscure recordings, We Remember Sam Cooke,  a
tribute album recorded by The Supremes.  Though seemingly an odd choice —
Cooke was killed months before Cole, so why not Gaye or The Four Tops? — Cooke
set a path to the mainstream that Motown and The Supremes very much admired.
The trio’s The Supremes at the Copa (1965) — a venue that Gordy long
craved for the label’s flagship act — was released a year after Cooke’s own
Copa recording was released.

The
commercial aspects of tribute recordings notwithstanding, within the economies
of Black cultural production, particularly in the era when Black artists were
largely marketed to segregated Black audiences, such recordings took on greater
significance and relevance. In his book Soul Covers: Rhythm and Blues Remakes and the Struggle for
Artistic Identity (Duke University
Press), which examines Aretha Franklin’s tribute to Dinah Washington, Michael
Awkward, note that Dinah Washington had anointed Aretha Franklin as the “next
one.”

But “having
failed to that point to produce recordings that proved indisputable that she
was worthy of such praise,” Awkward writes, “Franklin’s remakes of songs
associated with the recently deceased Queen of the Blues can be seen as her
attempt to demonstrate that she was indeed ready to wear her idol’s crown.”
(17)   According to Awkward, Franklin’s Unforgettable: a Tribute
to Dinah Washington (1964), is a “compelling manifestation of this singer’s
early attempts to master the nuances of black vocal traditions.” (28)

At the time
of her death, Dinah Washington might have also felt the pressure to fill the
stilettos of the previous “one”; When Billie Holiday died in July of 1959,
Washington was the most natural heir her legacy, and thus of heir to a broader
tradition Black vocalists.  That Franklin’s tribute to Washington was
called Unforgettable, is a reminder that even Cole  cast a shadow
over Washington, as Unforgettable was also the title of a 1961 album of
pop standards by Washington, that included covers of Cole songs like the title
track and “When I Fall in Love.”  The album, her second for the Mercury
label, after string of recordings on Mercury’s Jazz subsidiary, was a
deliberate attempt to cross Washington over to a pop audience. Indeed,
Washington’s most well known songs “What a Difference a Day Makes” and “This
Bitter Earth” were recorded with Mercury in this period.

In the late
1950s, Washington recorded tribute albums for Bessie Smith and Fats Waller, in
what might be an example of Washington apprenticing within the Black Blues
songbook — still yet to be correctly identified as The American
Songbook. Such an apprenticeship might have been what Sam Cooke had in mind
when he recorded a tribute to Billie Holiday in 1959, shortly after her death.
 Tribute to The Lady is easily the most obscure of his recordings
as a pop singer, and Cooke’s stilted execution of Holiday’s catalogue only adds
to the oddity of the recording.

Yet what
Cooke reminds us, is that for the generation of Black artists prior to the
incorporation of independent Black music into the mainstream of popular music,
the politics of crossover had less to do with individual access to a larger
audience, but was born out of a communal ethic to broadly share the aesthetic
and spiritual practices of Blackness or what might more applicably be described
as Negro-ness.  

This is what
you hear in Cooke’s tribute album to Billie Holiday; clean, smooth, playful
even, Cooke’s versions of Holiday’s classics don’t attempt to overshadow the
spirit — the darkness and the trauma — of her own recorded history, but aims
to make the genius of Holiday palatable, even legible, to an audience that
could never — even still, some almost sixty years after her death — see, hear
or feel Holiday’s genius for what it was.  

That Cooke
largely fails in this endeavour — that he is indeed still finding his voice is
not lost here — only highlights the difficulties of refracting such
brilliance.  Yet it is the gesture that most matters, and a gesture that
still matters as Gregory Porter introduces the music of Nat King Cole — a
Holiday contemporary — to a whole new generation.

***

Mark Anthony Neal is the author of several books and Professor of African and
African-American Studies, and Professor of English at Duke University.

You’re Nobody ‘Til Somebody [Sings] You: Tributing Blackness

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