A Sunday Classic: Thanking Hal Jackson
by Mark Anthony Neal
By the time I first encountered Hal Jacksonin the mid-1980s—regularly tuning into his Sunday Classics broadcast on New York’s 107.5 WBLS-FM—he had long been established as the cultural pioneer that we celebratetoday. As a kid growing up in the Bronx, literally in the shadow of Hip-hop, my own musical taste were drawn to the burgeoning mix of urban and street music that the now defunct 98.7 Kiss-FM (WRKS) was cultivating; Hal Jackson and WBLS were my parents’ music—so I thought.
And it was perhaps, out of respect for my parents, particularly my dad, for whom Sunday mornings were as precious as any time of the week (though ne never set foot in a church), that I began to listen to Jackson’s program. I very much remember hearing Jackson spin Brook Benton’s “Rainy Night in Georgia” (1970)—a record my father, a Georgia native, wore out during my childhood—and watching the visible reaction on my dad’s face. Music was the bond that my father and I shared, and as I grew older and my dad and I had less contact with each other, Hal Jackson’s Sunday Classics(and New York Met games) became the space where we connected.
When I first started listening to Hal Jackson, I had already begun to show scholarly interests in the study of Black music. There were few classes that I could take in college at that time—Nelson George had yet to publish Where Did I Love Go? (1985) or The Death of Rhythm and Blues (1988)—so WBLS, specifically Vaughn Harper’s Quiet Storm and Jackson’s Sunday program, became my learning lab.
I recall one Sunday morning in particular, when Jackson played a track from Jimmy Scott’s version of “Unchained Melody” (The Source,1969). At the time I was unfamiliar with Scott, a singer most well known for his ability to naturally sing in registers we typically assign to women; I actually thought it was Nancy Wilson that I was hearing, and was shocked to find out that it was a man. When Jackson later played Dinah Washington, an artist who inspired and was inspired by Scott, and who was a particular influence on Wilson and a young Aretha Franklin (during her early years on the Columbia label), I realized that he was simply having school; I never failed to miss class if I was anywhere in the vicinity of WBLS’s signal. I am sure there are many others who can say the same.
When I starting doing radio in the early 1990s—hosting a show called Soul Expressions on Sunday morning for WCVF-FM in Chautauqua County (New York State), I borrowed from Jackson’s (and Harper’s) playbook, using Miles Davis’s “Someday My Prince Will Come” as the musical bed when I addressed the audience (Harper frequently used Joe Sample and David T. Walker’s “In My Wildest Dreams” later sampled for Tupac Shakur’s “Dear Mama”).
During those years at WCVF, I liberated quite a few recordings—long forgotten—as those records became the raw materials for the dissertation that I was writing, later published as my first book What the Music Said: Black Popular Music and Black Public Culture (1998). Yet as I went through those stacks, trying to piece together a framework for the Black music tradition and popular resistance, it was always with the critical sensibilities that Jackson and SundayClassics equipped with that I did that work.
Years later, whenever I was in New York visiting my parents, it was not unusual for me to seek out Jackson’s Sunday Classics. The show expanded at various points from those early days, and Jackson often ceded control to Clay Berry & Debi B as he got older—but still, he never failed to teach his listeners something of value about the music and the communities that helped to create and sustain it.
To be sure there were other folk who influenced my work in this regard; the aforementioned Vaughn Harper, the late Gerry Bledsoe, the late Frankie Crocker, Imhotep Gary Byrd, the late Chuck Leonard, Felix Hernandez and his Rhythm Review, and Bev Smith (remembering her BET talk show), who along the late Gil Noble were direct inspirations for the work I do with Left of Black—were also majors figures for me. Yet, I always go back to Hal Jackson, who taught me more than anything about the value of passion, professionalism, stamina and longevity; may he rest in peace and his legacy continue to inspire.
***
Mark Anthony Neal is the author of five books including the forthcoming Looking For Leroy: (Il)Legible Black Masculinities (New York University Press). He is professor of Black Popular Culture in the Department of African & African-American Studies at Duke University and the host of the Weekly Webcast Left of Black. Follow him on Twitter @NewBlackMan.
