This Magic Moment:
My First and Most Improbable Emissary into Black Music and Black Culture
by Mark Naison | special to NewBlackman
David Leonard’s recent essay “White Boy Remixed: Whiteness and Teaching Race,” got me thinking about my own convoluted evolution as a white scholar of Black Studies, and in particular about an important figure in my life whose story was left out of my book White Boy: A Memoir.
His name was Ron English and he was a basketball counselor at a “progressive” but virtually all white summer camp I went to for three years, beginning 1959, Camp Taconic in Hinsdale Massachusetts.
At first glance, Ron seemed to be a most unlikely emissary for Black culture (a term that virtually no one, certainly, no one I knew used in those pre-Black Power years). Ron was 6’7” tall, all arms and legs, with a brownish blond crew cut atop what, for someone his size, seemed to a very small head. He spoke with a Midwestern twang and seemed out of place among the mostly Jewish, leftwing campers, who came from sophisticated, highly educated families who lived in the Upper West Side of Manhattan or wealthy suburbs, that is until he moved.
With the exception of Connie Hawkins, Roger Brown and Billie Cunningham, all of whom played high school basketball in Brooklyn- in the same division-when I was growing up, Ron English was the greatest athlete I had ever seen in my life. He moved with catlike grace and excelled in every sport he tried his hand at. Not only was he an amazing basketball player, who ended up as the last cut of the Kansas City team in the American Basketball Association, he could hit a golf ball 300 yards and was the best softball or baseball player I had ever competed against.
But it was not Ron’s athletic feats which left the biggest impression on me, it was his encyclopedic knowledge of rock and roll and rhythm and blues, which he displayed three times a week when he DJ’d the dances that Camp Taconic held in the evenings. For some reason, this progressive camp, which had folk singing every morning, sponsored evening dances 3 times a week for all campers over 10, where boys and girls could dance to the latest rock and roll hits, slow or fast, and if the spirit moved them “make out” for up to 5 minutes after the dance behind the archery range. As a 13 year old just reaching puberty, I felt that I had died and gone to heaven and I hoped against hope that some female camper would feel the same way I did and join me on the archery range.
Those moments, alas, proved few and far between, since before I went to college and grew a goatee, I had a face “only a mother could love.” But while waiting in vain for “This Magic Moment” ( The Drifters) on the dance floor, I was utterly entranced by the music Ron was playing and the commentary he gave that accompanied it. While Ron would play a broad spectrum of rock and roll hits, including artists like Elvis and the Everly Brothers, it was clear that his real love was for African American rhythm and blues artists, particularly those from the Midwest.
He would grow particularly reverential when putting on Jerry Butler’s “Your Precious Love,” which he described as the greatest slow dance song of all time, and regaled us with stories of seeing Jerry Butler live. He had an equally high opinion of Hank Ballard and the Midnighters, whom he had also seen live, and made sure that we got to exercise our lindy hopping skills to songs like “A Quarter to Three” and “ A Thrill Upon the Hill.” He had a special feeling for the Five Satins “In the Still of the Night” which he played at every dance he ever DJ’d, and which many of us tried to imitate in harmony when we went back to our bunks, especially those of us who missed out on the make out sessions on the archery range.
For me, an impressionable 13 year old from a Brooklyn working class neighborhood, surrounded by campers much wealthier than I was, longing for a romance that rarely came, Ron turned what could have been times of disappointment into times of incredible excitement. Ron made it seem that these songs, virtually all produced by African American artists, were almost holy artifacts, not only filled with beauty, but with a capacity to transport people beyond the everyday cares of life and make them bond with one another in love and friendship. Even before I met Ron, this music had stirred me; I had started listening to rock and roll at age 11, and had always had special feeling for urban harmonic songs like “ Why Do Fools Fall in Love” ( Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers) and “Just Two Kinds of People in the World” ( Little Anthony and the Imperials).
But now someone ten years older than men, who I admired greatly, was giving me an explanation, and a justification, for the feelings I had when heard those songs, and investing those feelings with an air of romance.
That this man was a white Midwesterner, playing and commenting on what was basically Black music in front of an all white audience of Jewish campers, represented an irony that escaped me at the time. I only knew that this music made me feel better than anything I had ever heard in my life, not only inspiring me with longings for of adolescent sex and romantic love, but making me feel I was part of a sacred community of young people bonded by music that was at times, more beautiful than anything I had ever heard in my life.
I was not yet a civil rights protester. I would not attend my first demonstration, at Ebingers Bakery in Brooklyn, until the Spring of 1962. My studies of Black history were at least five years down the road. The relationship with a Black woman that made me the person I am today was still in the distant future.
But something was taking place at those dances at Camp Taconic that would mark me for life. I cannot, to this day, hear Jerry Butler’s “Your Precious Love” without feeling chills run through me, and without repeating, to everyone around me, Ron English’s pronouncement that this was “the greatest slow dance song of all time.”
A white Midwestern basketball star, DJ’ing at all white dances at a progressive Jewish camp, had made one white boy, and possibly many others, fall in love with Black music, and become open to a connection with Black culture that would remain an integral part of his life.
Appropriation? Certainly. Exploitation. Quite possibly. But maybe something else was going on here, albeit unconsciously. Nation Building. Creating a society where Black people’s labor and music and struggle were the building blocks of a new civilization that might replace, though only with great pain and conflict, the White Supremacist society that we had all been born into.
An improbable scenario? For sure. But when I put on “Soul Town” on my XM radio driving to work each morning and hear the songs Ron played, I think nothing is impossible.
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Mark Naison is a Professor of African-American Studies and History at Fordham University and Director of Fordham’s Urban Studies Program. He is the author of two books, Communists in Harlem During the Depression and White Boy: A Memoir. Naison is also co-director of the Bronx African American History Project (BAAHP). Research from the BAAHP will be published in a forthcoming collection of oral histories Before the Fires: An Oral History of African American Life From the 1930’s to the 1960’s.
