GREENFIELD — From “Lord, How Come Me Here?” to “A Change is Gonna Come” and “Rapper’s Delight,” opera singer Perry Brisbon presented a musical timeline of the “American sound” at Greenfield Community College on Friday.
Brisbon, who teaches voice lessons and leads singing groups at Eastern University, started the two-hour Black History Month performance with spirituals, described as the “throughline” of American music’s history. His tenor voice boomed “sorrow songs” like “There Ain’t No Freedom Here, Lord” and “signal songs” like “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” which enslaved people sang to alert others that they planned to escape soon.
Brisbon introduced the genres and tunes with tidbits of context. According to the singer, West Africans carried musical influences like the pentatonic scale on slave ships, a scale that prevails in the riffs of pop and R&B singers today, like Adele.
“Much was lost, but the scale wasn’t lost and the rhythm wasn’t lost,” Brisbon told the audience of about 70 listeners. “What was found in the drums wasn’t lost.”
After spirituals, Brisbon sang ragtime and blues melodies.
With the rise of Historically Black Colleges and Universities like Fisk University after the Civil War, “It’s like they’re newly freed,” Brisbon said, referring to Black Americans at the time. “They get to sing about something else. Remember, spirituals were about ‘God, let me go,’ but they began singing the blues, which means basically, ‘Man, let me be.'”
To introduce “12-bar blues,” a signature rhythm of the genre, Brisbon asked the audience to call out a topic. When one attendee shouted out, “snow,” he improvised a song about the snow falling outside GCC’s windows.
“Oh y’all, it’s snowing and it’s cold outside,” Brisbon sang, tapping his foot.
Angela Campbell, vice president of institutional mission, culture and climate at GCC who organized the Black History Month event, spoke of the deep sadness in many blues songs before singing the harrowing lyrics of Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit,” written by Abel Meeropol under the pseudonym Lewis Allan.
Brisbon then told the audience stories about the beginnings of jazz, largely in Louisiana, including the genre’s original name, “jass,” and cornetist Freddie Keppard’s decision to turn down recording the first jazz album because he “didn’t want anybody to steal [his] stuff.” The audience joined in by singing back the lyrics of “It Ain’t Necessarily So.”
Campbell then crooned the gospel classics, “Sweet, Sweet Spirit” and “Precious Lord, Take My Hand,” the song Martin Luther King Jr. requested in his last words before his assassination in 1968.
To introduce soul, the next genre in Brisbon and Campbell’s timeline, the opera singer told the tale behind singer-songwriter Sam Cooke’s “A Change is Gonna Come.” Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind” stuck in Cooke’s head not only for its hook. He thought, “We need a song like that,” Brisbon said, and wrote “A Change is Gonna Come.”
Brisbon then broke down examples of Black musicians’ influences on big names in rock ‘n’ roll, from Otis Blackwell’s “All Shook Up” that landed in Elvis Presley’s lap to Little Richard mentoring The Beatles and Muddy Waters’ sound throughout The Rolling Stones’ music. He emphasized that the pattern of Black musicians being behind white artists’ chart-topping songs continues today.
The musical timeline then led to love, with Brisbon and Campbell singing Donny Hathaway and Roberta Flack’s “Where is the Love?” and “The Closer I Get to You.”
“We have this sense of a different kind of expression of the love,” Brisbon said. “And I love these love songs because they’re so clean and so pure and so honest, even when they’re bluesy.”
From soul, came disco, Brisbon said, its faster cousin who had the moves.
“Folks were dancing again and they were really dancing,” he said, singing a snippet of Chic’s “Good Times.” Without any beat or piano, Brisbon then broke out into the recognizable “I said a hip-hop, the hippie to the hippie” and rapped 28 lines of “Rapper’s Delight.”
“And that’s the birth of hip-hop,” Brisbon said before the audience clapped and whistled.
After the show, the opera singer described the performance as “CrossFit” for his voice, which jumped from hymns to blues, love songs and rap.
To “come full circle,” Brisbon ended the program with “Witness,” a spiritual, and the crowd rose in an immediate standing ovation.
In a phone interview on Monday, Campbell recalled telling Brisbon, whom she had worked with before at Cabrini University, about the idea that started the program.
“I had a vision for a Black History Month program that would tell an aspect of Black history through song, through music and the influence of the spirituals … not just the spiritual artistically, but also in terms of its purpose in the struggle for freedom, its purpose in enabling Black people to feel some of their humanity, hear their humanity, to remember their humanity and to cry out to God for salvation … spiritual, yes, but also physically in America to be free, to live in peace without violence,” Campbell said.
According to Campbell, the music she and Brisbon sang early in the program blended with Indigenous American tribes’ music and European music.
“These musical forms also synergized and morphed into an American sound, and the throughline of this American sound goes back to the presence of Africans in America. The throughline was the spiritual,” she said.
As the two crafted the program, Brisbon “amplified” Campbell’s vision, filling in the gaps with knowledge, she said.
“He gave us a taste, the sound, and the songs told the story,” she said.
