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| ABBEY LINCOLN |
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| Click to purchase Abbey's 2007 release, ABBEY SINGS ABBEY. |
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ABBEY LINCOLN
also known as AMINATA MOSEKA
(6 AUGUST 1930)
Actress, singer, songwriter, painter, poet Abbey Lincoln was born Anna Marie Wooldridge on August 6, 1930, in Chicago, Illinois. The tenth of twelve children, Lincoln grew up on a farm in the township of Calvin Center, Michigan. In interviews the artist recalls the freedom with which she “picked out melodies”at the family piano where she began to experiment with music at age five. As a youth, Lincoln sang in the choir in the AME church. At age fourteen she was deeply affected by recordings of Billie Holiday and Coleman Hawkins. After winning an amateur singing contest in 1949, Lincoln traveled to California. Following a brief stint as a nightclub performer in Los Angeles, Lincoln moved to Honolulu where she sang with The Rampart Streeters at the Trade Winds Club. During this time she met jazz performers Louis Armstrong and Anita O’Day. In Honolulu, Lincoln attended several Billie Holiday performances at the Brown Derby. Reportedly, Holiday also attended two of Lincoln’s shows. Performing under the names Gaby Lee and Gaby Marie upon her return to California in 1954,Lincoln joined the company of José Ferrer, Rosemary Clooney, and Mitch Miller, who introduced her to lyricist Bob Russell. Russell later became her manager and suggested the singer change her name to Abbey Lincoln. (The story goes that Russell claimed President Lincoln had not successfully freed anybody, but he thought Abbey "could handle it.") In July of 1956, Abbey Lincoln’s Affair:A Story of a Girl in Love, the singer’s first recording with the Benny Carter Orchestra, was released on the Liberty imprint of the Riverside label. Lincoln recorded three consecutive albums for Riverside, including That’s Him (1957), It’s Magic (1958), and Abbey Is Blue (1959). In 1956, the year she landed a singing role in the film The Girl Can’t Help It, Lincoln moved from California to New York City. In New York she performed regularly at the Village Vanguard and met many leading musicians, including Max Roach, Thelonious Monk, Dizzy Gillespie, and Charles Mingus. These artists, whose music addressed racial inequality, influenced Lincoln so that she too began to draw on cultural and political content in her songs. However, more important than the reflection of social causes in their music was the fact that these musicians were also composers. In many interviews Lincoln credits Monk with encouraging her to compose, although it would be more than a decade before she fully embraced this aspect of her artistry. Lincoln collaborated with Max Roach and Oscar Brown Jr. on the landmark civil rights recording We Insist! Max Roach’s Freedom Now Suite. The 1960 work featured “Tryptich:Prayer /Protest/ Peace,” in which Lincoln’s vocal obligatos depart from traditional jazz singing and scatting. Here,words are replaced by hums, chants, and sighs, which are followed by screams, roars, screeches, and pants. The performance transformed Lincoln’s reputation from supper club chanteuse to “social” singer. That same year, Lincoln also appeared in the off-Broadway production of Jean Genet’s absurdist drama The Blacks, which boasted the cast of James Earl Jones, Maya Angelou, Billy Dee Williams, Roscoe Lee Browne, and Cicely Tyson. In 1961 Lincoln provided vocals and lyrics for two songs, “Garvey’s Ghost” and “Mendacity,” on Roach’s Impulse album Percussion Bitter Sweet. She also released her own album, Straight Ahead, on the Candid label which featured four of her own lyrics, most notably “In the Red,” which spoke to black America’s economic plight. Lincoln married percussion giant Max Roach in 1962. She also founded the Cultural Association for Women of African Heritage. According to Lincoln, the association was organized for the sole purpose of exploring the cultures of the African diaspora. The group’s activities included promoting African hairstyles (during this time Lincoln herself began to wear an Afro and braids and was quoted in Ebony magazine for coming out against black women who straighten their hair), producing Afrocentric fashion shows, and protesting the assassination of Patrice Lumumba at the United Nations. In the mid-sixties, Lincoln’s acting career gained new impetus when she appeared in several films, including Nothing but a Man (1964) and For Love of Ivy (1966). Following her divorce from Roach in 1970, Lincoln returned to California, where she taught drama at California State University in Northridge; painted; composed songs; and wrote essays, poetry, and a play. That year author Toni Cade Bambara edited and published the first anthology of nonfiction, fiction, and poetry by African American women. To The Black Woman, Lincoln contributed an essay on black women’s moral, economic, and sexual victimization entitled “To Whom Will She Cry Rape?” That year Lincoln’s play, Pig in a Poke, was also produced at the Mafundi Institute, a black cultural center in the Watts section of Los Angeles, and she appeared on several television shows, including Mission Impossible, Name of the Game, and The Flip Wilson Show. She did not record again as a lead until 1973’s People in Me, the only album she made in the seventies, recorded in Japan on the Philips label. However, during this period Lincoln traveled extensively throughout Asia, Europe, and, most significantly, Africa. In 1975, the South African singer Miriam Makeba invited Lincoln to Africa as her guest. For Lincoln, the highlights of the trip involved meeting the leader of Guinea, Ahmed Sékou Touré, who named her “Aminata” (trustworthy), and the Zairean Minister of Information, who gave her the name “Moseka”(God’s image in the form of a maiden). Lincoln has since commented in many interviews that immediately following that trip “[she] discovered songs coming out of [her].... It was the biggest surprise. I started writing them down when I was about forty-two....In a way it’s like catching the rain in your hand. It’s everywhere.” The 1980 collaboration with tenor saxophonist Archie Shepp culminated in the album Painted Lady (Blue Marge, also reprinted as Golden Lady on the Inner City label in 1981). For the German label Enja, Lincoln released Talking to the Sun (1983) and three Billie Holiday tribute albums (1987). The
latter compilation, Abbey Sings Billie, signaled a comeback for the singer. Lincoln moved back to New York in 1989, where she was signed by Verve at the behest of French record producer Jean-Philippe Allard, and cast by Spike Lee to appear in his 1990 jazz drama Mo’ Better Blues. (Lincoln appears briefly in the opening scene as the mother of the young trumpeter protagonist, Bleek Gilliam.) In what most would consider a late flowering of her career, Lincoln has recorded ten albums (of primarily original
compositions) to great critical acclaim; they include: The World Is Falling Down (1990); You Gotta Pay the Band(1991); Devil’s Got Your Tongue (1993);When There Is Love (1994); A Turtle’s Dream (1995); Who Used to Dance (1997); Wholly Earth (1999); Over the Years (2000); It’s Me (2003); and Abbey Sings Abbey (2007). Writing about Lincoln’s voice, jazz writer Stanley Crouch noted, “[She] sings with a dark sound and a small range which she has exploited with such cunning that you could say her virtuosity is homemade. . . . Through gradations of intonation and inflection she seems to pick at a pitch, or worry it into a broader emotional world, especially on those long notes Lincoln flares and narrows with chest and head tones.” Characterized by her behind-the-beat phrasing and diction, distinctive features of Lincoln’s singing are her ability to alter tone color, the voice production, and emphasis on word syllables she chooses to stress in any given song. Her combination of pitch and time is what linguists and philologists call “significant tone.” Significant tone or tonal semantics as demonstrated in Lincoln’s singing include elongating vowels, staccato phrasing, and talk-singing to lend special meaning to a particular word or phrase. Hers is an African-based aesthetic that also draws from spirituals and work songs. Lincoln performs in the tradition of the griot or the
African American preacher; that is, she has made vernacular sermonic performance the central element of her artistic expression. In the vocal performances of original songs such as “Talking to the Sun,” “I Got Thunder (And It Rings!),” “Devil’s Got Your Tongue,” “Wholly Earth” and “Throw It Away,” her interpretations are dramatic and instructive in language, tone, theme, and gesture. Describing her own approach to singing in 2003, Lincoln told interviewer Wayne Enstice, “I’m a storyteller. I don’t have any confusion about it in my mind at all. I tell stories on the stage set to music.” The recipient of several honorary doctorates, in 2001 Lincoln was the subject of a two-day symposium, For Love of Abbey, at Columbia University where critics, musicologists, musicians, writers, and literary and film scholars gathered for panel discussions and other events devoted to the artist’s work. In 2002, her original compositions were honored by Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York City with a three-evening concert program. Abbey Lincoln: Over the Years—An Anthology of Her Compositions and Poems featured vocalist Freddy Cole, saxophonist Joe Lovano, and tap dancer Savion Glover. Abbey Lincoln, the 2003 recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master Award, died in Manhattan on August 14, 2010.
Excerpted from Barnett, LaShonda Katrice. I GOT THUNDER: BLACK WOMEN SONGWRITERS ON THEIR CRAFT (DaCapo Press, 2007).
Selected Discography for Abbey Lincoln:
That’s Him. Riverside 251 (1957)
Abbey Lincoln: Sessions, Live. Calliope 3009 (1958)
w/Max Roach. We Insist!-Freedom Now Suite. Candid 9002 (1960)
Golden Lady. Inner City 1117 (1970)
People In Me. Inner City 6040 (1973)
Abbey Is Blue. Riverside OJCCD-069-2 (1987)
Talking to the Sun. Enja 4060 (1987)
Abbey Sings Billie, Volume 1. Enja 79633 (1987)
Abbey Sings Billie, Volume 2. Enja 7037-2 (1987)
Straight Ahead. Candid CCD-79015 (1989)
It’s Magic. Riverside OJCCD-205-2 (1990)
The World is Falling Down. Verve 843-476-2 (1990)
You Gotta Pay the Band. Verve 314-511-110-2 (1991)
Devil’s Got Your Tongue. Verve 314-513-574-2 (1992)
When There Is Love. Verve 314-519-697 (1992)
Affair...a Story of a Girl in Love. Capitol Jazz CDP-0777-7-91199-2-0 (1993)
A Turtle’s Dream. Verve 314-527-382-2 (1995)
Painted Lady: In Paris. EPM 70176 (1996)
Who Used To Dance. Verve 314-533-559-2 (1997)
Abbey Lincoln: Live at the Iridium. Private Recording (1997)
Wholly Earth. Verve 314-559-538-2 (1998)
Over the Years. Verve 314-549-101-2 (2000)
It's Me. Verve B000126802 (2003)
Abbey Sings Abbey. Verve B000PC1QNI (2007)
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