On April 10, 2012 at 7:30pm, our friends at
The Booksmith will host reissue producer/music scholar
Pat Thomas for a signing of his new book
LISTEN, WHITEY! Sights and Sounds of Black Power 1965 – 1975 and the
companion album (out now on Light in the Attic Records), which is being called the definitive Black Power aural document!
Over a five year period, Pat Thomas befriended key leaders of the seminal
Black Power Movement,
dug through
Huey Newton’s archives at Stanford University, spent countless hours and thousands of dollars on eBay, and talked to rank and file
Black Panther Party members, uncovering dozens of obscure albums, singles, and stray tapes. Along the way, he began to piece together a time period (1967-1974) when revolutionaries like
Bobby Seale,
Eldridge Cleaver,
Angela Davis, and
Stokely Carmichael were seen as pop culture icons and musicians like
Gil Scott-Heron,
The Last Poets,
Bob Dylan, and
John Lennon were seen as revolutionaries.
LISTEN, WHITEY! chronicles the forgotten history of Motown Records; from 1970 to 1973, Motown’s
Black Power subsidiary label, Black Forum, released politically charged albums by Stokely Carmichael, Amiri Baraka, Langston Hughes, Bill Cosby and Ossie Davis, and many others, and explores the musical connections between Bob Dylan, John Lennon, Graham Nash, the Partridge Family (!?!) and the Black Power movement. Obscure recordings produced by SNCC, Ron Karenga’s US, the Tribe and other African-American sociopolitical organizations of the late 1960s and early ’70s are examined along with the Isley Brothers, Nina Simone, Archie Shepp, Art Ensemble of Chicago, Clifford Thornton, Watts Prophets, The Last Poets, Gene McDaniels, Roland
Kirk, Horace Silver, Angela Davis, H. Rap Brown, Stanley Crouch, and others that spoke out against oppression. Thomas further focuses on Black Consciousness poetry (from the likes of Jayne Cortez, wife of Ornette Coleman), inspired religious recordings that infused god and Black Nationalism, and obscure regional and privately pressed Black Power 7-inch soul singles from across America. The text is accompanied by over 200 large sized, full-color reproductions of album covers and 45 rpm singles, most of which readers will have never seen before.