When I’m Called Home: Remembering Abbey Lincoln
by Mark Anthony Neal | theLoop21 (2010)
“I’ve always been concerned with the story I’m telling. This music is social. Our music is social. Nobody cares whether it sounds pretty or not. Can you tell the people what its like to be here?”—Abbey Lincoln in LaShonda Katrice Barnett’s I Got Thunder: Black Women Songwriters on Their Craft
When Abbey Lincoln gave her last breathe on the morning of August 14, 2010, she left a legacy, that though obscured by time and ignorance, marks her as one of the most singular Black artists of the 20th Century. Though it is important to remember Lincoln as one of the truly original jazz vocalists ever, there are few artists who could claim to have been as obsessed with using her art—as singer, songwriter, essayist (she contributed to Tone Cade’s groundbreaking anthology The Black Woman), painter and actress—as a vessel to explicate the full humanity of herself and the people, that she often claimed, were inside of her.
Born Anna Marie Wooldridge in August of 1930 in Chicago, Lincoln came of age on a farm in Calvin Center, Michigan. Like many aspiring artists from that era, Lincoln was profoundly affected by the music of Billie Holiday. As Lincoln recalled with journalist Lisa Jones in a 1991 New York Timesinterview, “My father worked in the houses of wealthy people who gave him recordings. The first singer I heard on record was Billie Holiday when I was 14.” Two decades later Lincoln would be favorably compared Holiday, though she would struggle throughout much of her early career to escape the shadows of both Holiday and the formidable mythology that has been erected in her name.
After apprenticing in various places including Honolulu and California, where she had initially moved after graduating high school, and taking the name Gaby Lee, Lincoln began to be managed by lyricist Bob Russell. It was Russell who suggested another name change—Abbey Lincoln—and who helped Lincoln sign with the noted Jazz label Riverside, where she recorded four albums beginning with Abbey Lincoln’s Affair: A Story of a Girl in Love(1956) That’s Him (1957), It’s Magic (1958) and Abbey is Blue(1959). On Lincoln’s debut, recorded with the Benny Carter Orchestra, Riverside tried to position Lincoln as the sexy, girl-next-door torch song singer and it was in that vein that Lincoln appeared in the film The Girl Can’t Help It (1956), wearing the same dress that Marilyn Monroe once wore in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953). When Lincoln appeared on the cover of Ebony Magazine—in Monroe’s red dress—her fate as yet another “silent” pretty face seemed assured. But like her contemporary Eartha Kitt, Lincoln had another vision for herself.
Living in New York City, Lincoln became professionally acquainted with a group of progressive jazz artists, including drummer Max Roach, who would not only become Lincoln’s musical mentor but her romantic partner; the two married in 1960. The increased influence on Lincoln of musicians like Roach, Sonny Rollins and songwriter Oscar Brown, Jr. can be indexed in the changing style of her albums, culminating with her 1959 classic Abbey is Blue, which was released the same year as Holiday’s death. Featuring legendary side-musicians like Philly Jo Jones, Sam Jones, Kenny Dorham and Wynton Kelley, Abbey is Blue finds Lincoln interpreting Mongo Santamaria’s “Afro Blue,” Kurt Weil’s “Lonely House” (with lyrics from Langston Hughes), Oscar Brown Jr.’s “Brother Where Are You?” and the Duke Ellington classic “Come Sunday.” Abbey is Blue, not only served as a tribute to some of the important Black songwriters of the era, it also signaled a shift in her art, as she more dutifully linked her music to the broader struggles of Blacks globally.
Lincoln’s transformation began to take place a few years earlier when she literally threw away the Marilyn Monroe dress and was fully articulated with two recordings, 1960’s We Insist—Freedom Now with Max Roach and her own Straight Ahead(1961), which would be her last recording with Roach and last studio recording for more than a decade. Some of the lasting standouts on Straight Aheadinclude “When Malindy Sings,” based on the Paul Lawrence Dunbar poem (Lincoln would later point Maya Angelou to Dunbar’s work as inspiration for I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings), “Left Alone” a Billie Holiday song that she never recorded, but on which Holiday’s accompanist Mal Waldron appears, and Thelon us Monk’s “Blue Monk.” Monk was in the studio when Lincoln recorded “Blue Monk” and famously told her “don’t be so perfect” which Lincoln understood as a reminder that “if your voice cracks, it’ll give you texture.”
Straight Ahead established Lincoln as a important artist in her own right—the New York Times offered a rare three column review—but also instigated charges by critic Ira Gitler that Lincoln was a “professional Negro”—using the Civil Rights movement to further her career. The reality couldn’t be further from the truth as Lincoln sacrificed, what was thought to be the prime years of her career, essentially banished from the mainstream because of her willful linking of her art with her radical political beliefs. As Lincoln reflected in a remarkable 1961 interview with the Pittsburgh Courier, a black newspaper, “I have viewpoints, outlooks and values…I cut my hair, and then stopped straightening it, and I love it.” Explaining her political beliefs more forthrightly two decades later, Lincoln told Marie Moore of the New York Amsterdam News that “I’m very outspoken because my great-grandmother and grandfather were slaves…I take it personally that my people were enslaved and used as chattel and still are. I do not separate myself from my life, What happened to my people happened and happens to me.”
In later interviews, Lincoln was realistic about the impact of her radicalism in the 1960s on her career, particularly in comparison to male instrumentalists like Roach and John Coltrane whose radicalism in their music did not affect their careers to the extent that they impacted the careers of Lincoln and Nina Simone. “I took the weight because I was the voice,” Lincoln admitted to Lisa Jones in 1991, “I was the one yelling in everyone’s ear. It hung with me for a long time.”
Lincoln survived the 1960s touring in Europe and eventually catching the eye of independent filmmaker Michael Roemer, who cast Lincoln opposite Ivan Dixon in the now classic Nothing But a Man(1963). Lincoln later appeared opposite Sidney Poitier in For the Love of Ivy (1968). Though Lincoln was poised to pursue a full-fledged acting career—against Roach’s wishes who wanted a domesticated wife—she found the Hollywood scene difficult to negotiate. In a 1968 Washington Post interview, Lincoln expressed concerns about “doing an imitation of a white women either as a woman or really as an actress.” Lincoln was more direct five years later in another Pittsburgh Courier interview where she says that “the scripts that were sent me were not representative of the people I know and of the women I bring to the stage.” Lincoln goes on to say in the interview that “the people who have cared for me have always been the ones who were called ‘niggers’—the people who are called ‘niggers’ are well spring where I go.”
When Lincoln sat down with the Pittsburgh Courier in 1973, she was in another moment of radical transformation. Her marriage to Roach ended three years earlier and she was living in Los Angeles with her mother. Lincoln recalls old friend Redd Foxx—then popularly known as television’s “Fred Sanford” giving her money from time to time when she needed it. She also took on two additional names; the names Aminata Moseka were given to her by Guinean President Sekou Toure and the Minister of Information in Zaire respectively, during a tour of Africa with Miriam Makeba. While traveling in Japan in 1973, she also made her first studio recording in more than a decade, People in Me, the first in which she wrote the lyrics to all of the songs. Recorded with a few of Miles Davis’s sidemen and not released in the United States until 1979, the recording laid the foundation for what would be Lincoln’s renaissance in the 1980s. As Farah Jasmine Griffin writes in If You Can’t Be Free, Be a Mystery: In Search of Billie Holiday, “People in Me introduces us to the mature, independent artist…Like a phoenix, she is reborn from the ashes of her earlier lives.”
By the early-1980s Lincoln was performing regularly around New York City, primarily with a cadre of younger artists including saxophonist Steve Coleman, James Wideman—both of who, appear on 1984’s Talking to the Sun. Though she is still interpreting other lyricists, including Stevie Wonder whose “Golden Lady” and “You and I” she covers during this period, she not only is writing lyrics but also composing music. One of those songs is “Throw It Away” (Golden Lady,1980), which Lincoln told LaShonda Katrice Barnett in her book I Got Thunder, “helped save my life.” It was fertile period for Lincoln, as he created the body of work that would sustain her for the rest of her career.
When Lincoln appears as the mother of “Bleek Gilliam” in the Spike Lee film Mo’ Betta Blues (1990) she is on the cusp of what would be her most sustained period of recording. Signing with Verve in 1989, Lincoln would record 11 albums over the final twenty years of her life, beginning with The World is Falling Down in 1990. Writing about Lincoln in 1996, New York Times jazz critic Peter Watrous begins his piece with the simple observation that “sometime in the last 10 years, Abbey Lincoln came into greatness as a jazz singer.” Twenty years after she walked away from her music, Lincoln was now a “woman at her peak” and willing and able to take the kinds of aesthetic risks that would mark her as maverick in her later years. One such moment is her brilliant collaboration with Mavis Staples and the Staple Singers (including Pop Staples) on the track “Story of My Father.”
When Nate Chinen profiles Lincoln upon the release of her last recording Abbey Sings Abbey in 2007 much of the story is about her songwriting and how far Lincoln had to travel to be able to write the songs that allowed her the opportunity to tell her own stories. That red Marilyn Monroe dress was long gone— a forgotten trinket of the Black woman that Lincoln was and the world that she helped to change, fifty years earlier. Abbey Sings Abbeyhas the feel on an artist saying good-bye, not unlike listening to Billie Holiday’s Lady in Satin (1957), which poet Fred Moten describes as the “record of a wonderfully articulate body in pain.” But unlike Holiday, one doesn’t hear pain or trauma in Lincoln’s voice, but triumph. As she told, Chinen, “I had the chance to be myself, and I was.” Farah Jasmine Griffin perhaps says it best, “perhaps Lincoln’s greatest creation is herself.”
