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CDs by James
Brown
Live
at the Apollo /
Messing with the Blues /
20 All-time Greatest Hits /
Star Time /
50th Anniversary Collection /
Foundations of Funk
The PayBack /
Say
It Live and Loud
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Duet for
The Godfather
By Wordslanger
James Joseph Brown
Jr.
May 3, 1938- December 25, 2006
Lay down the red cape
softly for the last time
and Please, Please
tell God, Hold On
cuz, he’s Coming
make room in the
Celestial band
to receive
The Godfather of Soul
He’s on the Good Foot
got a whole New Bag
He left us with horn samples
a funky dance
and a picture of him
bending with the music
never breaking in the
madness of the rhythm
Slide and bop on home
to God Soul Brother No. 1
J B
1939-2006-forever
listen for him in the thunder
moving from Carolina woods
cross the Georgia state line
listen for the horn in the wind
of the continuum and know
he lives in our funk
still shapin the bounce
Yeah boy
look for him on the dance floor
a century from now
moving in the rhythm
like he jus been
restin in the ocean
when ya find him
slidin cross a stage
sweat on his brow
you will know
soul don’t die
it multiplies.
Wordslanger 2006
posted 2 January 2007 |
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Ayodele Nzinga is a dramatist,
arts lecturer and performance poet living in the San
Francisco Bay Area. She is the Artistic Director of The
Lower Bottom Playaz and The Sister Thea Bowman Memorial
Theater in West Oakland. She is a force to be reckoned
with on the West Coast spoken word circuit. Well known
for her take no prisoners style as the WordSlanger she
is loved by vets and admired by young poets. She is
affiliated with Marvin X’s Recovery Theater. She holds
an MA and an MFA in Writing and Consciousness. She is
currently a candidate for PhD at the California
Institute of Integral Studies, San Francisco CA.
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Salvage the Bones
A Novel by Jesmyn Ward
On one level, Salvage the Bones is a simple story about a poor black family that’s about to be trashed by one of the most deadly hurricanes in U.S. history. What makes the novel so powerful, though, is the way Ward winds private passions with that menace gathering force out in the Gulf of Mexico. Without a hint of pretension, in the simple lives of these poor people living among chickens and abandoned cars, she evokes the tenacious love and desperation of classical tragedy. The force that pushes back against Katrina’s inexorable winds is the voice of Ward’s narrator, a 14-year-old girl named Esch, the only daughter among four siblings. Precocious, passionate and sensitive, she speaks almost entirely in phrases soaked in her family’s raw land. Everything here is gritty, loamy and alive, as though the very soil were animated. Her brother’s “blood smells like wet hot earth after summer rain. . . . His scalp looks like fresh turned dirt.” Her father’s hands “are like gravel,” while her own hand “slides through his grip like a wet fish,” and a handsome boy’s “muscles jabbered like chickens.” Admittedly, Ward can push so hard on this simile-obsessed style that her paragraphs risk sounding like a compost heap, but this isn’t usually just metaphor for metaphor’s sake. She conveys something fundamental about Esch’s fluid state of mind: her figurative sense of the world in which all things correspond and connect. She and her brothers live in a ramshackle house steeped in grief since their mother died giving birth to her last child. . . . What remains, what’s salvaged, is something indomitable in these tough siblings, the strength of their love, the permanence of their devotion.— WashingtonPost
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Say it Loud: Poems about James Brown
Edited by Michael Oatman and Mary Weems
Preface by Lamont
B. Steptoe
This anthology is a
tribute in poems to James Brown and includes work by
over 30 poets including Amiri Baraka, Emotion Brown,
Katie Daley, Thomas Sayers Ellis, Kelly A. Harris, Tony
Medina, Ayodele Nzinga, Michael Oatman, Michelle Rankins,
Patricia Smith, Lamont B. Steptoe, George Wallace and
Mary Weems.
"On May 3, 1933,
James Joseph Brown was born in Barnwell, South Carolina
in the heart of Jim Crow America. On December 25, 2006,
JB, the hardest working man in show business passed on.
These poems celebrate, memorialize and speak to the
legacy of the Godfather of Soul. They share
their memories from childhood to adulthood of the man
who was influenced by such musical giants as Little
Richard, but who laid the physical and musical steps for
artists such as Michael Jackson and many current Rap and
Hip Hop musicians today."—Adah Ward-Randolph
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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If you like this page consider making a donation
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Negro Digest /
Black World
Browse all issues
1950
1960
1965
1970
1975
1980
1985
1990
1995
2000
____ 2005
Enjoy!
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
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The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
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Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
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January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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update
5 February
2012
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