I am black: I am the incarnation of a complete fusion with the world, an intuitive understanding of the earth, an abandonment of m...y ego in the heart of the cosmos, and no white man, no matter how intelligent he may be, can ever understand Louis Armstrong and the music of the Congo.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Gone are the days when my heart was young and gay, Gone are my friends from the cotton fields away,... Gone from the earth to a better land I know, I hear their gentle voices calling "Old Black Joe."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It was a heavy burden on the conscience to know that while you sat in Music 101, some contemporary--as "worthy" of a college educa...tion as you were, but one who had been denied the opportunity because he was poor, or black, or both--was getting his head blown off in Vietnam. Many students believed that such inequity was wrong, but couldn't bring themselves to redress it personally by refusing the student deferment. It's a dreadful combination: to act for self-protection yet at the same time to loathe oneself for acting that way.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A woman drew her long black hair out tight And fiddled whisper music on those strings... And bats with baby faces in the violet light Whistled, and beat their wings And crawled head downward down a blackened wall....LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun; Coral is far more red than her lips' red;... If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun; If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head. I have seen roses damasked, red and white, But no such roses see I in her cheeks, And in some perfumes there is more delight Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks. I love to hear her speak, yet well I know That music hath a far more pleasing sound; I grant I never saw a goddess go: My mistress when she walks treads on the ground. And yet by heaven I think my love as rare As any she belied with false compare.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Mackerel gulls were all the while flying over our heads and amid the breakers, sometimes two white ones pursuing a black one; quit...e at home in the storm, though they are as delicate organizations as sea-jellies and mosses; and we saw that they were adapted to their circumstances rather by their spirits than their bodies. Theirs must be an essentially wilder, that is, less human, nature, than that of larks and robins. Their note was like the sound of some vibrating metal and harmonized well with the scenery and roar of the surf, as if one had rudely touched the strings of the lyre, which ever lies on the shore; a ragged shred of ocean music tossed aloft on the spray.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
During the cattle drives, Texas cowboy music came into national significance. Its practical purpose is well known--it was used pri...marily to keep the herds quiet at night, for often a ballad sung loudly and continuously enough might prevent a stampede. However, the cowboy also sang because he liked to sing.... In this music of the range and trail is "the grayness of the prairies, the mournful minor note of a Texas norther, and a rhythm that fits the gait of the cowboy's pony."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »