![]() Drums that told the news almost before it happened! Drums that spoke with big voices like big men! Drums like a conscience and a deep heartbeat that knew right from wrong. Drums that could reach across the country like a church-bell sound. Although his spoken delivery of the Juneteenth sermon by the trombone-playing preacher “Daddy” Hickman is unemotional, no theatrics, more parsed than performed, the writing evokes the hypnotic “What Did I Do to Be So Black and Blue” prologue to Invisible Man, particularly when he reads of drums “that talked like a telegraph. We see him in his book-lined study reading a passage from his manuscript into a tape recorder, playing it back, listening, and making notes. There’s a kind of retro Zoom aura about a YouTube visit with Ellison (“USA: The Novel - Ralph Ellison … 1966”). ![]() Young’s piece begins by citing the music of Frankie Beverly and Maze as “one of the things Black people have enjoyed that white folks don’t know about.” Follow the Times’ YouTube link and you find that the group’s song “Before I Let Go” has had 36,926,680 views, compared to 44,104 views of 52-year-old Ralph Ellison (1913-1994) in a 1966 documentary reading the Juneteenth sermon from his work in progress.īeing among those who, as Young puts it, “are used to having Black culture to draw from like a renewable well,” I feel closer to Ellison’s reading than to the soft, laid-back music of a “soul / quiet storm band,” as Maze has been described. As poet Kevin Young points out in a guest essay (“Our Freedom Is America’s Freedom”) in Sunday’s New York Times, Juneteenth and other emancipation holidays commemorate “both the promise of freedom and its delay.” In Young’s words, “The lesson of Juneteenth is both of celebration and expectation, of freedom deferred but still sought and of the freedoms to come.” Last week Juneteenth was declared a federal holiday, a long-time-coming recognition of the occasion already celebrated as Jubilee Day or Black Independence Day two and a half years before the Texas liberation of June 19, 1865. Salinger was working on for the last 40 years of his life. According to O’Meally’s note, the piece in question (“Keep to the Rhythm”) was first published in 1969 as “Juneteenth,” a section from “Ellison’s forthcoming novel.” Given the fact that the novel didn’t actually “come forth” until 1999, five years after the author’s death and 47 years after the publication of Invisible Man, one of the great 20th century American novels, this has to be among the most famously delayed follow-ups in American literature, along with the still-unpublished Glass family saga J.D. U nable to find a copy of Ralph Ellison’s Juneteenth (Modern Library 1999) on short notice, I’ve been reading an excerpt reprinted in Living with Music: Ralph Ellison’s Jazz Writings (Modern Library 2001), edited by Robert O’Meally. There’s been a heap of Juneteenths before this one and I tell you there’ll be a heap more before we’re truly free!
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