BLACK HISTORY MONTH MUSIC TRIBUTES – Part III

Profonde Musique
Feb 17, 2026

Part III

I continue my month-long exploration and celebration of just some of the major Black forces in all genres of American music to commemorate Black History Month. The notable and laudable voices, musicians, innovators and influencers, the trailblazers filled with instinct and guile, but most of all courage, as every one of them strived to overcome hardship due to systemic racism to bring forth the most original and dynamic music of the age.

DJ Kool Herc

In the summer of 1973, Clive Campbell aka DJ Kool Herc, turned a Bronx, New York house party into an incubation lab for hip hop, a musical form of street poetry riding the crest of classic dance grooves that in 2017 surpassed rock and roll for the first time since the mid-1950s to become the most listened to genre of popular music in the western hemisphere. Word is Kool Herc also introduced “scratching” into the musical lexicon during this time – one turntable playing a backing track while the DJ holds onto a second album, moving it back and forth under the needle to create a percussive counter-rhythm.

Born in Jamaica, Clive was a relentless audiophile and certified music geek. At an impressionable age he was drawn to two key elements that birthed hip hop, both of which transformed the person merely playing the music into the central figure of the proceedings. The first is the music Campbell heard as a kid – mostly American R&B records bursting out of Memphis through Stax Records and Atlantic Records in New York City. The second is the technology that amplified its seductive grooves throughout neighborhood parties and teaming dance halls. The art of “dubbing,” paring down popular records to its rhythmic core by using their instrumental backbeats sans vocals with added reverb effects, also sparked the young Campbell’s interest, but to a rambunctious boy fueled with endless imagination, what may have been far more intriguing is what the guys who spun the records were doing while they played; a style of syncopated speech called “toasting.”

And so, it was Cambell, going by his stage name, DJ Kool Herc, joined by neighborhood poet, Coke La Rock, who transformed “toasting” into a New Yawk institution that rocked the house party hosted by his kid sister, Cindy, who charged a cover to buy expensive Manhattan styles for her upcoming middle-school year. Little did she know, her desire to look chic and provide a venue for her brother to kick it, exploded a musical revolution for decades to come.

Muddy

McKinley Morganfield aka Muddy Waters, is the bridge between the distant dark past of Black travails through the post-slavery cotton fields of Mississippi to the heavy rails of the Great Migration north to Chicago. A natural shapeshifter, he was rural, Southern Delta, acoustic, but he was also dapper, urban and electric. Along the way he invented the modern rock band – guitar and vocals (Muddy), guitar (Jimmy Rogers) bass (Willie Dixon), drums (Elgin Evans), keyboards (Otis Spann on piano), and sometimes Little Walter blowing harp. They were plugged in, loud, bold, and uncompromising. Forever to be the Muddy “Mississippi” Waters, he was the patriarch of the blues, a genre McKinley defined, dominated and turned into modern art.

At the famed Chess Studios, Muddy’s songs, many of them penned by Willie Dixon, were the foundation of modern blues and the precursor to rock and roll, “Hoochie Coochie Man,” “I Just Want to Make Love to You,” “I’m Ready,” “Mannish Boy,” “Rollin’ and Tumbling,’” and on and on, paving the way for giants like Etta James, Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, and more. Just about every rock and roll band from the 1960s on carry his imprint – the Rolling Stones took their name from his song, “Rollin’ Stone,” as did Bob Dylan for his “Like a Rolling Stone.” And I thank them all for introducing me to the blues and to Muddy, who, in 1981, I was fortunate enough to see play live in N.J., where he was just as vibrant and impressive as ever.

Cab

The multi-talented and immensely popular Cabell Calloway III, aka Cab, engineered a trailblazing career that spanned over 65 years of recording, performing, band leading, radio hosting and composing. His residency at Harlem, New York’s legendary Cotton Club in the 1930s became American lore, It is where he sparked his massive hit, “Minnie the Moocher” – the first single recorded by an African American to sell a million copies – featuring its infectious “hi-di-hi-di-hi-di-ho” refrain. His highly emotive dances and broad stage acting brought his songs to life and introduced the greater (White) public to the early 20th century Black experience.

Like many of the artists I’m spotlighting, Cab, who was taught to “scat” by legendary jazz trumpeter and vocalist, Louis Armstrong, smashed through racial barriers that helped launch the careers of hundreds of future Black performers by his example and agency – not the least of which the dazzling Dizzy Gillespie, who was a member of his famed orchestra.

Beyond music, Cab also has the distinction of breaking racial restrictions in broadcasting, as he became the first African American to have a nationally syndicated radio program. Later, he starred in several celebrated musicals, Stormy Weather (1943), Porgy and Bess (1953), The Cincinnati Kid (1965), and Hello Dolly! (1967), and finally, the musical comedy film The Blues Brothers (1980).

It is not too much to state that on the shoulders of Cab Calloway stands every Black pop music performer, actor, and musical entrepreneur.

The High Priestess

Born Eunice Kathleen Waymon, Nina Simone remains the symbol of the power, beauty and liberation of the Black Woman as a force of musical and social revolution. A masterful pianist with an arresting contralto voice that sent shivers down the spine, Nina used her knowledge and virtuosity to bend all manner of music – classical, folk, gospel, blues, jazz, R&B, and pop – to her considerable will. She could spin Johann Sebastian Bach into Thelonious Monk into Pinetop Perkins and make it distinctly her own.

Classically trained in all the important schools like Julliard in NYC, she decided to chuck academia and “serious” musical pursuits to invade the pop charts, beginning with her 1959 Top 20 hit, “I Loves You, Porgy,” after which she began combing her chameleon-like stylings into her tireless work for the burgeoning civil rights movement.

This was when Nina recorded one of the most compelling live albums ever, Nina Simone in Concert, in which she specifically addressed racial inequality in the United States with her seminal song, “Mississippi Goddam,” a response to the 1963 murder of Medgar Evers and the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama that killed four young black girls and partly blinded a fifth. She later stated that the song was “like throwing ten bullets back at them” and it led to a predictable industry boycott of her music.

Undeterred, Nina not only dedicated her art to the civil rights cause, but she also spoke and performed at major events such as at the Selma to Montgomery marches. But the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr in the spring of 1968 shook her to her core, as racial violence bursted from every corner of America, causing her to leave the country to take up residency in France. A proud bisexual voice for the early struggles of the LGBTQ community, she lent her talents to their fight for equality as well and continued producing thought-provoking and experimental music until her death in 2003 at the age of 70.

Nina’s socio-political determination helped to inform countless Black female and male artists during her time, including much of the hip hop community’s early commitment to change found in Public Enemy, N.W.A., and Lauryn Hill.

Prince of Darkness

Miles Davis possessed an epic musical instinct. He was at once a taskmaster, an innovator, a master musician and inevitably a jazz icon. There are few figures of modern music – or any era for that matter – that did more to alter the creative landscape of his genre and the entire scope of music’s evolution than the cooler-than-ice trumpeter from Illinois.

It would be easier to cover what Miles didn’t accomplish – what he did do was play trumpet as a teenager in the renowned Charlie Parker’s bebop quintet in the mid-1940s – and not long after invented “cool jazz” with his seminal, and correctly titled, Birth of the Cool album. In the 1950s, he introduced the concept of “hard” or blues-oriented phrasing to be bop jazz with his spectacular Round About Midnight, while jump-starting Parker’s heir apparent on sax, John Coltrane in his groundbreaking sextet, which included the recording of my favorite and hugely popular jazz album, Kind of Blue. During this period, he also managed to work with arranger Gil Evans on orchestral jazz collaborations for the Spanish music-influenced Sketches of Spain – sparking the “Third Stream” jazz movement. In the late 1960s, his exploratory masterpiece, Bitches Brew, mixed mid-century jazz sounds with electric rock instruments to introduce the world to “fusion,” which ignited the prog-rock explosion of the early 1970s.

And this is just the tip of the evolutionary iceberg for one of the most important artists of our time. Miles Davis wrote and then rewrote the parameters of what we know of modern music, jazz or otherwise.

Funk Brother

James Jameson is arguably the most important electric bass player in the history of popular music, and perhaps its most talented and innovative, who’s best work transformed the Beatles’ Paul McCartney from pedestrian rock bass player into the genre’s foremost melodicist on the instrument. His uncredited contributions on most of Motown Records hits during that label’s halcyon period from the dawn of 1960s into early 1970s came as part of Motown’s esteemed Funk Brothers house band, which turned him into the central backing musician of Berry Gordy’s Hitsville U.S.A. studio in Detroit. This group of extraordinary musicians, led by James, tracked a remarkable 56 R&B #1 records and an equally staggering 23 that topped the Billboard Hot 100.

A sought-after jazz talent that turned down college scholarships to study music, James instead developed his original bottom-end groove style of melodic bass playing that relied cleverly on combined chromatic runs, syncopation, ghost notes and inversions while on tour with the dynamic Jackie Wilson, and then when paired with fellow jazz artists, drummer, Benny Benjamin, keyboardist, Earl Van Dyke, and dual guitarists, Joe Messina and Eddie Willis, he dominated the world of session playing. The Funk Brothers began laying down tracks for among others, the Supremes (“You Can’t Hurry Love”), the Temptations, (“My Girl”), Stevie Wonder (“For Once in My Life”), Martha and the Vandellas (“Dancing in the Street”), Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, (“Going to a Go-Go”), And Marvin Gaye (“I Heard It Through the Grapevine”) to create what became the Motown Sound.

After leaving Motown in 1973, James continued to play on hits for Gladys Knight & The Pips, the Sylvers, Marilyn McCoo and Billy Davis Jr., Robert Palmer, Dennis Wilson, and Aretha Franklin to name just a few, turning what was originally a background accompaniment instrument into a lead equal to that of the vocals or the guitar lines, providing hundreds of bassists in his wake, among them the Beach Boys, Brian Wilson, the Who’s John Entwistle, and Rush’s Geddy Lee, a blueprint to expand the instrument’s place in popular music. 

Lady Soul

And then there is Aretha Franklin, the undisputed, unequalled, infinitely talented and beautiful Queen of Soul. The most pristinely gorgeous and emotionally charged voice to arrive in pop music, Aretha, since her pre-teen days as a gospel singer from Detroit, Michigan to her rise as one of the most important female artists in soul, pop, and rock, never found a song she couldn’t conquer unerringly filtered through her singular prism.

To understand the power and majesty of Aretha at her very best is to digest her Atlantic years, as she led some of the best musicians in the world through her songs and those of others that she interpreted as well as any singer – playing piano, while arranging musical styles and melodies along the way. This 1967 to 1968 run is otherworldly – I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You, Aretha Arrives, Lady Soul, and Aretha Now are four of the best albums of the 1960s, an era lauded for its transformative musical evolutions in rock and pop.

When Aretha took songs like her signature track, “Respect” by Otis Redding or “You Make Me Feel Like (a Natural Woman,)” by Carole King – both high-level composers – she outright owned them, as both songwriters attested. She could be compelling, sexy, vulnerable and uplifting, running the complete gamut of emotions in an album, and sometimes, in one song.

Despite her immense popularity as a secular artist, Aretha returned time and again to her roots in the gospel tradition, which she performed as well as anyone ever, whether beside her father, Reverend C. L. Franklin or in front of traditional Baptist choirs. Her 1972 live album, Amazing Grace and the film of its recording, released just a few years ago, contains the best of the Queen of Soul in every form.