A HUGE thank you to Haley Chellberg for lending her beautiful French Horn(!) playing
Something not commonly known in the United States is that June is African-American Music Appreciation Month. I find the obscurity of this celebration regrettable: popular and art music from this country owe their existence to Jazz, Spirituals, Field holler, and the Blues, which are unambiguously Black American music. These musics are the best musics in the world and are incredibly unique for being born in, "a community that has the historical memory of being unfree in a supposedly free land" as Ken Burns would put it.
Fables of Faubus was composed by Charles Mingus (1922-1979) in response to the Little Rock Crisis. After Brown. V. Board of Education, many southern states resisted or outright refused racial integration in schools. Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus, for example, sent the Arkansas Guard in to prevent nine black students, Ernest Green, Elizabeth Eckford, Jefferson Thomas, Terrence Roberts, Carlotta Walls LaNier, Minnijean Brown, Gloria Ray Karlmark, Thelma Mothershed, and Melba Pattillo Beals from attending Little Rock Central High School, or as he put it, to "preserve the peace." Mingus, and most Americans, saw for what it was: State-enforced racial violence. Mingus penned this composition with lyrics such as:
*Oh, Lord, don't let 'em shoot us!
Oh, Lord, don't let 'em stab us!
Oh, Lord, no more swastikas!
Oh, Lord, no more Ku Klux Klan!
Name me someone who's ridiculous, Dannie.
Governor Faubus!
Why is he so sick and ridiculous?
He won't permit integrated schools.*
But when the composition was to be recorded as part of the seminal Mingus Ah Um (1959), Columbia prohibited the overtly political lyrics from appearing on vinyl. In paying homage to Mingus, we decided to omit the lyrics, and to omit most of the other voices as well, to show how biting and poignant the music can be even without words.