BHM #8: SOMETIMES I FEEL LIKE A MOTHERLESS CHILD

Sometimes I Feel Like A Motherless Child has always been with us. When I looked up its origin, there was none. One day, it stood up on his hind legs in the distance and wailed. Its origin is America itself. Its an old, traditional spiritual that traces back to slavery here in the United States.

“The United States often split enslaved black families and sold to other slave owners, leaving families torn apart and some never reuniting.  This practice was intentionally used to punish enslaved people by selling their family members to plantations far away.”

Maybe the song has always existed. Hanging in the air like the aroma of flowers assumed extinct. Waiting for someone to recognize it and call its name.

Its a spiritual, dictated by spirit. Its the blues: a good person feeling bad. A long way from home.

The lyrics read like someone unable to release the burden of being. Being thrives: its purpose hides.

By law, enslaved parents did not have rights to their children and legally they could be sold without notice.  Women often performed abortions on themselves or infanticide on their young children to save them from the horrors of slavery.

And this:

Slavery did not recognize the sanctity of marriage.  Couples and families could be broken up at any time, without warning. Commonly, except on large plantations, husbands and wives did not reside on the same place, sometimes not in the same neighborhood following sales or owners’ relocation. Thus, the reality is that despite men’s often incredibly heroic efforts at visiting and supporting their families, women were forced to raise their children largely on their own, for as long as they could since they lived under the constant threat of sales, sale of their children, or their own sale.

Sometimes I imagine who I would have been if I had not been adopted. I wasn’t motherless– I was overwhelmed with mothers. Who would I have been as a full son to the parents who raised me? Who could I have been if my birth mother never gave me away? Who could I have been if I’d left both families behind and created a new story, made up a new life in some city chosen at random? There’s no way of knowing, just as there’s no certainty regarding who exactly wrote Motherless Child. Perhaps it doesn’t matter. Its traditional. We sing it when we need it, because we feel it. If you are not currently motherless, you will be.

Sometimes while cleaning: I would play the song, the version as interpreted by Mahalia, her name a sacred key unlocking every door in my house. Sometimes, my mother playing solitaire in the next room would ask if I felt like a motherless child. Her sitting Right There. She knew I was adopted, and I knew too. We both lived the lyrics from different ends. Her mother died when she was very young. The woman I called ‘grand-momma’ was her step-mother.

There are not enough versions of Motherless Child to speak for every motherless child, but there’s enough for any child to chose a preference. Fisk Jubilee Singers of Fisk University is credited with performing it publicly in concert in the 1870’s. If you mention a singer, from Elvis to Prince, at some point they’ve stood in the that field beneath the microphone of the sun and sang. I will say the only versions I care about are from jazz great Jimmy Scott, (born July 1925 – June 2014), Gospel icon Mahalia Jackson (Oct 1911 – Jan 1972), and singer and civil rights activist Odetta (Dec. 1930 – Dec 2008).

The song tells the tale. But here’s my address back to it as a poet:

A BRIEF NOTE ON JIMMY SCOTT

One of the greatest jazz stylists and vocalists of all time; Jimmy Scott, (b. July 1925 – Jun 2014) was a talent admired and unmatched. He had a voice worth savoring. He got his big break touring with bandleader Lionel Hampton in 1949. It was said Billie Holiday would go listen to him perform. Indeed, he was the singer who humbled other singers. He was known to sing in an unusually high register and preferred slowing down ballads and love songs until they dripped honey. He was born with the ultra rare condition, Kallmann Syndrome which kept his body from going through puberty and kept his contralto voice high until the end of his life. He was hugely talented but not very successful, and despite releasing music in the early 50’s, spent decades out of the studio, forced to work menial clerical jobs. His career resurged in the 90’s after performing during a memorial for musician Doc Pomus. Madonna was once quoted saying Scott was the only singer who could bring her to tears.

I dropped many tears listening to his glorious work and I was fortunate to see him perform live a couple of times before his death in 2014. As a performer he was generous, delicate, masterful. This blog links to his cover of Motherless Child, but also monumental is his version of Unchained Melody